1000 DOCTORS (AND MANY MORE) AGAINST
VIVISECTION

Edited by Hans Ruesch

First published 1989 Ó Hans Ruesch Foundation

(PART 3 OF 4)

In TheLancet, October 10, 1942 (p. 431), reference is made to the work of Dun­can
and Blalock in producing 'experimental shock' in dogs by various crushing
injuries. The comment is made in the Annotation that all these experiments were
inconclusive since renal failure, usually the cause of death in man, did not
occur at all in dogs.

"In the old days
we were taught, as the result purely of animal experiments, that digitalis
raised the blood pressure. We now know that this is utter nonsense. Indeed, it
is a remedy of very great value in certain cases when the blood press­ure is
found to be abnormally high." (Dr. James Burnet, Medical World, July
3,1942, p. 338)

An article,
"Medical Research", by James Burnet, M.A., LLB, M.D., March 1942:

“One of the chief
causes which has led to this disastrous state of affairs is the gradual rise
into prominence of the experimental physiologist and pharma­cologist. Students
attending classes of physiology nowadays learn little or noth­ing, save the
results of animal experiments. Unfortunately, too, these results are never
definite or final. What one physiologist teaches today is refuted by an­other
physiologist tomorrow. The same remark is true of pharmacology. Stu­dents of
today can seldom write a decent prescription, but they know all about the
action of certain drugs on cats, dogs and even rats. We must constantly bear in
mind that we can very rarely apply to humans the results obtained with ex­perimental
animals. Animal research is often quite misleading when its results are
interpreted in relation to disease. Feeding experiments are notoriously fal­lacious.
Take one striking example. As the result of experiments on rats (i.e. ro­dents)
fed on oatmeal we have been told that children should never be given oatmeal as
it is prejudicial to their teeth. This, we can say from practical clini­cal
experience is utter nonsense. As a matter of fact, we are now being constant­ly
told to use more oatmeal.

“After all, our real
function as medical men is to diagnose and efficiently cure diseases. A
knowledge of the results of research carried out on animals will not help us
here. In fact, it may hamper us. A very obvious case in point is cancer. Until
we cease pinning our faith to the results in the laboratory of experiments on
mice and other animals we venture to submit that no real progress in dis­covering
the cause, much less the cure, of cancer will ever be made. The cause and cure
of this disease will never be discovered in the laboratory by doctors of
science or of philosophy. How long will this important truth remain unheeded by
some of the heads of our profession?

“If our knowledge of
disease is to make any real progress, it must be by re­search work carried on
at the bedside of the patient. By careful and close obser­vation, of which only
the trained mind of the practical clinician is really capable in this sphere,
we may detect variations in disease and in respect to treatment which may help
us to understand better the nature of many pathological condi­tions. After all,
we have to deal not with lower animals but with man whose complex organism is
something apart from that of the former. As practical men we must be made to
see for ourselves that we are slowly but surely becoming the mere slaves of the
research worker. We are being taught to ignore clinical work which, we submit,
is paramount in every branch of medical science.”

Medical World, January 16, 1942, in a
review of Essentials of Endocrino­logy by Dr. Arthur Grollman: "So
much of the work done in connection with these various substances has
necessarily had to be carried out on laboratory animals, and when these results
have been applied to humans they have been found to be hopelessly misleading
and even dangerous in not a few instances." (p. 482)

"Another form of substitution therapy for men is
injection of male hormone solutions, of which synthetic products have recently
been put on the market... At present, many contradictory reports of animal
experimentations becloud theissue for
the clinician, and only too often create an almost hopeless confusion."
(Review, Medical World, January 17, 1941, pp. 504-505)

”I am always sorry for the clinician who tries, in the
best scientific manner, to translate academic research work, carried out,
unfortunately, for the most part on the lower animals, with different metabolic
rates and life spans, into terms of practical dietetics." (Professor E.P.
Cathcar, in a preface to Diet in Health and Disease, Eyre and
Spottiswoode, 1940)

Sir Arbuthnot Lane, Bart., C.B., M.B., M.S., F.R.C.S.:

"Cancer is by no means a mystery disease, the
secrets of which can only be discovered by scientists, armed with microscopes,
ultramicroscopes, test tubes, etc. Unfortunately the researchers have obscured
the causation of this common­place malady by the investigation of countless
relatively unimportant scientific details which they have discussed in papers
and books, in language quite incom­prehensible to the general public and to the
great majority of medical men them­selves...Cancer is a disease of
civilisation. It is practically unknown to the primi­tive races leading
primitive lives. Hundreds of medical men who have practiced for decades among
the South African negros have never seen a cancer case…On the other hand,
cancer is not uncommon among the South African negroes in the coast towns who
for decades have lived more or less on the white man's diet...

“Cancer is...essentially a nutritional disease. It is
far more prevalent in the towns where people subsist on artificial food than in
the country where men eat fresh natural food, take plenty of exercise and are
less troubled with intestinal stagnation and auto- intoxication than are the
sedentary inhabitants of the larger cities. We need not abolish civilisation in
order to abolish cancer. We need only reform our lives in accordance with the
dictates of nature...

“Cancer is currently supposed to be a disease due to
old age... Mr. Barker points out that the cancer mortality among the
short-lived public house workers and butchers is approximately three times as
great as it is among the long-lived agricultural labourers and clergymen...

“Cancer is a disease of faulty feeding, not a
mysterious disease which can be fathomed only by eminent scientists who have
specialised in microbiology, chemistry and other sciences... Cancer...results
from chronic poisoning of the tissues of the body during decades...

“Cancer mortality has increased by 50 per cent
during the last 15 years...The foundation of cancer is laid in the kitchen and
in the dining-room and women have it in their power to limit its ravages and
even to eliminate it al­together."

H.W. Magoun, M.D., Ph.D.: "I regard vivisection
as not only horrible - it is criminal. Moreover I am convinced it does more
harm than good to the practice of medicine and surgery."

Dr. C. Mathieu, Paris: "While studying medicine
in the hospitals I was at one time charged with the functions of preparing the
physiological experiments. It was for a short time only as I could not support
the sense of horror which these vivisections caused me. I consider them to be
useless cruelties. I never learnt anything from them, and I consider the
campaign against vivisection noble and humane."

H. Fergie Woods, M.D.,
M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., etc., in an article, "Rabbits, Silicosis, and
Aluminum" in the July 1940 issue of the Abolitionist: "One is tempted
to predict that the experiments, and the conclusions derived from them, will be
relegated to that great mass of useless and misleading exploi­tation of
animals, which unhappily persists in poisoning the minds of the medi­cal
profession."

As has been repeated
countless times in these and other pages, it is im­possible to argue safely or
scientifically from animal to man. In another issue of the same journal, H.
Fergie Woods wrote: "I have studied the question of vivisection for
thirty-five years and am con­vinced that experiments on living animals are
leading medicine further and fur­ther from the real cure of the patient. I know
of no instance of an animal experiment that has been necessary for the
advancement of medical science; still less do I know of any animal experi­ment
that could conceivably be necessary to save human life."

"For years I have carefully studied the annual
reports of the Ministry of Health, the Medical Research Council and the two
Cancer Research bodies, but I have been unable to discover what benefits they
have conferred on the com­munity, although I must confess I have often admired
their easy flowing rhetoric and their naive assumption of the value of their
own efforts as essays in subtle propaganda for the extraction of yet more money
out of the generous and cre­dulous British public." (Dr. W. Mitchell
Stevens, Medical World, July 5.1940.

"Of very considerable importance is the attempted
treatment of prostatic enlargement by means of male hormones. Experiments with
mice and monkeys unfortunately proved misleading when their results were applied
to man." (Review. Medical World, May 3. 1940. p. 226)

"Vivisection is mostly undertaken in the
expectation that the goal which has been mentally erected is attainable. The
results never justify the means as erecting goals is an idle pursuit as evidenced
by research conducted on these lines, retarding instead of advancing
progress." (Dr. J.E.R. McDonagh. Surgeon, in The Universe Through
Medicine, Heinemann. London. 1940. p. 371)

An article, "Fallacies About Vivisection",
by M. Beddow Bayly, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., in the Abolitionist. September
1940:

“Professor C. Lovatt Evans was reported to have told
the British Associ­ation at Glasgow in 1928 that "no doctor can use a
stethoscope, feel a pulse, take a blood-pressure, administer a hypodermic, give
an anaesthetic or a trans­fusion, perform any modem operations or indeed take
any steps in diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment without utilising at every turn
knowledge derived from results of animal experimentation and obtainable in no
other way.

“This is a statement fairly typical of the almost
incredible nonsense which pro-vivisectionists have the temerity to ‘broadcast’
in their public utterances and writings. It seems almost an insult to the
reader's intelligence to assume that it requires an answer. However, let us
take the claims in order.

“The stethoscope was invented by Flaennec when, in
1819, he screwed up a roll of paper in order to listen to the chest of a stout
patient.

“Hua Tu, one of the ablest physicians of all time,
lived in China 2,000 years ago and developed a high degree of accuracy in
diagnosis by feeling the radial pulse; he was also a pioneer in abdominal
operations (under anaesthetic drugs), and removed diseased lengths of bowel,
suturing sound portions with­out infection. He was also versed in the action of
the glands upon the body and practised organotherapy.

“In this latter connection it is interesting to recall
that Dr. Langdon Brown told the British Medical Association in 1925 that ‘the
pioneer observations were made at the bedside. Gull and Ord discovered the
functions of the thy­roid, when the laboratories had made no more helpful
suggestion than that it was merely helpful to improve the contour of the neck.
Addison was the first to point out the function of the adrenals, while the role
of the pituitary was recognised clinically from the symptoms of acromegaly.’

“Ability to estimate blood-pressure was gained by a
study of the laws of hydro-dynamics. In 1733, experiments upon animals, in
which tubes were in­serted directly into the animal's arteries, had been found
to be totally inapplic­able to man; they contributed nothing to our knowledge
of human blood-press­ure nor to the invention of the apparatus now used to
record it; this was not achieved until many years had elapsed since the futile
and cruel animal ex­periments were performed.

“The hypodermic syringe was invented by Charles G.
Pravaz, a surgeon of Lyons, in 1852; in the following year Alexander Wood, of
Edinburgh, used this method for injecting morphia for the relief of neuralgia
and thus paved the way for local anaesthesia. Drugs subsequently invented for
this purpose could obviously only be tested for efficacy upon human volunteers.

“Of the respiratory anaesthetics, chloroform was first
used by James Sim­pson in 1847; ether by William Morton in 1846, after
experiments upon them­selves and friends. Nitrous oxide gas had been suggested
by Sir Humphrey Davy as an anaesthetic in 1800, but it was not until 1844 that
it was first used during the extraction, by a colleague, of a tooth of a
dentist named Horace Wells.

“According to the Medical World. May 12, 1939:
‘The father of spinal an­aesthesia is August Bier, a German doctor who in 1898
injected a 1 per cent solution of cocaine into his own spinal canal in order to
observe its effects.’

“The new basal anaesthetics, which are applied by
rectal injection, were the direct outcome of clinical observation of the action
of Avertin, first used to allay the spasms of whooping- cough. Other drugs of
the same chemical series followed.

“As the Report of the Royal Commission on
Vivisection (1912) declared: ‘The discovery of anaesthetics owes nothing to
experiments on animals.’

“The first human blood-transfusion was made by Andre
Libavius in 1594 when, for a large reward, the blood of a young man was passed
into the veins of an older man. Modern technique depends upon a careful
matching of blood­ types, and no animal experiments have, or could have, helped
in this essential particular.

“Animal experiments for surgical skill have already been
shown to be il­legal in this country; abroad, we may sum the matter up in the
words of Dr. A. Desjardins, President of the Society of Surgeons in Paris: ‘I
have never known a single good operator who has learned anything whatever from
experiments on animals.’

“There is hardly a useful drug in the British
Pharmacopoeia which owes anything to animal experiments. Even the so-called
biological standardization is so unreliable that efforts are continually being
made to replace it by chemi­cal tests in the few cases in which it is employed.
There is plenty of evidence to show that animal experiments on creatures
differing from man in nearly every particular have been both misleading and
dangerous. Moreover, there is one complete system of medicine, the Homoeopathic,
practised by an increasing number of physicians for over a hundred years, which
is based upon prin­ciples that entirely rule out the validity of animal
experiments, all tests of the action of drugs being made upon human volunteers.

“Did space permit, every branch of knowledge utilised
by medical practi­tioners might similarly be shown to be independent of animal
experiments, but this brief article may fitly be concluded by a quotation from
an article in the Medical World. April 12, 1940, in which G.E. Donovan,
M.B., B.Ch., B.A.O., D.P.H., declares: ‘Instruments like the stethoscope,
thermometer, microscope, ophtalmoscope, X -rays, etc., made modern clinical
medicine. Take them away and you have practically nothing left.’ Yet none of
these was discovered, or

its use developed through experiments upon animals.”

------------

Dr. ErwinE. Nelson, in his presidential
address to the section on pharma­cology and therapeutics at the 1939 Annual
Session of the American Medical Association, asserted that the minimum lethal
dose of a drug, determined by in­jection, as in the case of digitalis, only
applies to 50 percent of animals tested, for "actually any individual
animal may be killed by an amount which is much smaller than this, or it may
require a considerably greater amount. Some cats require more than two and
one-half times the dose required for others." (Jour­nal of the American
Medical Association, Oct 7,1939, p.1373)

"All sulphonamide compounds, though singularly
free from toxic reactions demonstrable in animals, have proved, as clinical
experience widened, to be ca­pable of causing peculiar and undesirable effects
in the human patient" (Leading article, British Medical Journal Aug.
19, 1939, p405)

"Even when a drug has been subjected to a
complete and adequate pharma­cologic investigation on several species of
animals and found to be relatively non-toxic it is frequently found that such a
drug may show unexpected toxic re­actions in diseased human beings. This has
been known almost since the birth of scientific pharmacology." (Dr. E. K.
Marshall, Baltimore, Journal of the American Medical Association, Jan.
28,1939, p.353)

"The entire teaching of pharmacology is wrong at
the present time. The rea­son is that it is being taught by experimentalists
accustomed to the laboratory and animal experiments instead of, as it should
undoubtedly be, by clinicians with experience of human disease."
(Editorial, Medical Times, July, 1938)

Medical World, Apr. 15,1938, in its editorial (p.246) declared in
regard to the teaching of the medical student: "We calmly assert that he
is taught little or nothing that will be of any ultimate value to him. He is
lectured to about decere­brated cats, nerve-muscle preparations of the frog,
the theories of fatigue in muscle and similar matters, all of which are
hopelessly useless for his practical requirements as a medical man. Take the
comparatively recent drug, ace­tylcholine. As a result of animal experiments
this is stated to be of great value in paralytic ileus. We know that it is by
no means safe in this condition in hu­mans, and has actually caused death when
administered after operations."

"Cats are no good for scientific research,
because each gives different re­sults from the other. We gave powdered glass to
see how it affected their lungs. They lapped it up and thrived on it."
(Dr. A. E. Barclay, Nuffield Professor of Medical Research at Oxford, at a
conference on TB, as reported by the Sun­day Express, Apr. 10, 1938)

"The difficulties which beset the licensed
experimenter are many. In the first place, it is well known that it is almost
impossible, in an experimental ani­mal, to reproduce a lesion or a disease at
all comparable to such as is found in the human subject." Dr. Lional
Wbitby, Practitioner, Dec. 1937, p.651)

"...Let us by all means get back to the bedside,
and leave the laboratory worker to his experiments and his often hopeless
contradictions." (Editorial, Medical Times, Nov. 1937, p. 170)

Dr. A. J. Clark, writing upon 'Individual Response to
Drugs' in the Brit­ish Medical Journal, Aug. 14,1937, stated that (to
discover the lethal dose of a drug): "Until about twenty years ago the
method employed was to give varying doses to a dozen or a few dozen animals…As
soon as systematic investigations were made it was found that animals showed a
considerable individual variation in their response to drugs, and that consequently
the methods that had been in use for a century were inherently
inaccurate." (p. 307)

"This divorce of science from the art of medicine
is most regrettable. It is slowly but surely operating to relegate the
investigation of disease to the labor­atory and to found the treatment on the
very doubtful results obtained from ex­periments on animals that in most cases
have been rendered absolutely abnor­mal by anaesthesia and operation." Medical
World, July 9, 1937. Editorial article.

"The stomachs, which he had examined postmortem
in human beings who had died of pernicious anaemia, showed severe atrophy of
the fundic region...but practically no change in the pylorus or duodenum - a
finding completely the reverse of that which he had anticipated from his animal
experiments." (Report, TheLancet, Jun. 12, 1937, p.1404)

"The sooner we relegate the pure laboratory
worker to his proper place in medicine the more likely we are to advance in our
diagnosis and treatment of disease. At present we are being grossly misled by
the experimentalists." (Review of the Medical Annual, 1937. Medical
World, May 28, 1937, p. 462)

"We wish to know when the medical profession will
unite in expressing their dissatisfaction at the way in which they are being
misled by the published results of experiments on animals in physiological and
pharmacological labor­atories. " (Editorial, Medical Times, Apr.
1937)

"Clinical research is the only key - progress, in
the sphere of medicine at least." (Review, Medical World, Feb. 12,
1937, p.847)

Commenting upon experiments on dogs, cats and pigs,
the Medical Times, Dec. 1936, said: "The experimenters state that
it must be frankly admitted that human peptic ulcers are not caused by such
drastic alterations of the gastro-in­testinal canal as were occasioned in the
animals experimented on. Then why were those experiments performed at all? The
entire business sounds some­ what ridiculous to anyone with a really critical
mind." (p.187)

"The problem of dental caries is essentially one
affecting the human race...for it has not been possible to produce with any
certainty, in animals which can be kept in a laboratory, dental caries in a
form comparable with that occurring naturally in man." (The Imperial
Bureau of Animal Nutrition, Nutrition Ab­stracts and Reviews, VoI5, No.3,
Jan. 1936)

"The wasted time and energy over the modern lines
of cancer research are to be greatly deplored. We are sorry to think that so
many able research wor­kers are being tricked into believing that the cause and
cure of cancer will be discovered by animal experiments." (Medical
Times, Jan. 1936, p.3)

"The law, whose provisions are enacted and
enforced by your representatives or their agents, has made exceptions in the
laws relating to what would ordinarily be known as cruel treatment of animals,
in that it express­ly allows the practice of animal vivisection to a
comparitively very small num­ber of persons, to whom it issues certificates,
authorising them to undertake what is known as animal experimentation. Thus,
the laws of this country, which we are all supposed to endorse and uphold,
definitely condemn large and vastly in­creasing numbers of animals to
long-continued and frightful sufferings. Nay more, the law, through its
accredited agents, actually encourages and with your money subsidises the
performers of these practices. Moreover, according to Sir Ernest Graham-Little,
at a meeting of the Royal Institute of Public Health, about half the cost of
medical education is 'borne by the State' - that is to say, by the taxpayers.

“In dealing with this question of vivisection it must
be borne in mind that there are huge powerful commercial interests involved,
who themselves employ many of the vivisectors. Moreover, the League of Nations
has agreed to some unfortunate regulations regarding the testing of certain
drugs on animals before acceptance of their suitability for use by man.

“In this connection, I may say that I have, in the
past, used animal-tested and ordinary digitalis, and that I got better results
from the ordinary one than the animal-tested one. Another medical man to whom I
have mentioned the matter had similar results.

“The commercial interests have found vivisection
methods very profitable financially, and they put on the market increasing
quantities of attractively ­packed vaccines, serums and foods which are
dependent for their advertised properties on the sufferings endured in their
laboratories by large numbers of animals, some of them, alas, bred for this
specific purpose. In the case of those experimenters - many of whom have no
medical qualification - who are not ac­tually attached to business interests,
it used to be understood that they were en­tirely engaged in their pursuits for
the relief of human suffering. But now, it has been stated that 'it would be
possible to extend such a list of purely scientific advances almost
indefinitely, many of these coming into the category of science for science's
sake.'

“Now it is impossible to believe that men with their
way to make in the world carry on these vivisectional practices purely and
simply for the acquiring of knowledge, or what may be regarded by them as
knowledge. There is great per­sonal and national rivalry amongst vivisectors,
in spite of their vaunted interna­tionalism, and, moreover, any outstanding
achievement in vivisection - how­ever worthless it may appear to be to many as
to real value to humanity - is sure to bring the experimenter more in line for
promotion. Thousands of animals are experimented upon as demonstrations of
experiments performed on animals years ago. Tens of thousands more are
vivisected as 'controls' to other animals being experimented upon, or in
confirming or rejecting the published claims of other vivisectors. As reported
in The Abolitionist of August I, 1934, there were, in 28 months commencing
December, 1931, more than 22,000 stray dogs vivi­sected in Chicago alone. Can
it be wondered at that the criminal activities of that city have become a
byword? What are the results of this world-wide prac­tice of vivisection, for
which we, in part, find the money, and are therefore to a certain extent
responsible? Over and above the 'science for science's sake' ex­periments,
which I cannot think the ordinary taxpayer would regard as a good return for
his money if he took the trouble to inquire into the matter, what has
vivisection done for the various disabilities of mankind?

“Because animals are cheap and plentiful, and in their
case to a very great extent beyond the protection of the law, vivisectors are
encouraged to take undue liberties with the mental and physical
susceptibilities of their victims, and this is one of the reasons for their
failures. But each species of animal- including man - has a different bodily
make-up. Their cells, and the methods of their di­vision, are different. Their
organs, blood, cell juices and contents differ, as well as their nervous
systems. Yet the vivisector attempts to draw analogies from ar­tificial
injuries, implanted disease products, mutilations, or other unnatural means,
inflicted upon one or more animals of a species, to the process occur­ring
naturally in animals of another species, such as man. It will at once be seen
that no reliable results can be obtained by such methods, and, moreover, vivi­sectors
are at last discovering that what were at one time thought to be quite simple
processes occurring in the bodily organs and cells of animals are, in fact,
exceedingly complicated. Indeed, they are so complicated that it is impossible
to elucidate them in anything like their entirety by such crude methods. Why then
are such methods pursued with such persistence? The vivisectors are in a hurry,
and he who pays the piper calls the tune. Mankind desperately cries out for
help in alleviation of a condition due largely to his own carelessness, folly
and indiscretion, and the vivisector produces as near as he can, in some
totally different creature, the condition in entirely alien tissues to the
condition in man. It would be just as reasonable in many cases to attempt an
analogy between a farm cart and a motor car, or a cow and a prima donna.

“A tumour in an animal other than man is of a totally
different nature to ORe of an apparently exactly analogous nature in man. And
so it will be apparent to you that to paint an animal with tar, in order to
make a tumour comparable to one appearing on a human worker in tar, and to hope
to find there-from anything of value is pitifully like trying to make castles
from sand. Millions of pounds have been subjected to long-drawn-out suffering
ending in death in this chim­erical pursuit of the cancer problem during the
past 50 years, and it is more than time for its entire prohibition. (Applause.)

“For the reasons I have given you, I believe that
vivisection of any animal is essentially detrimental to the progress of the
human race and certainly totally misleading to medicine. Nevertheless, I was
one of more than 30 medical men who in 1928, in Liverpool, signed the petition
to Parliament for the Dogs' Exemption Bill. So long as such a Bill provides for
the total abolition of dogs for vivisection, I, for one, would support it, on
the distinct understanding that I would at once press for total abolition of
vivisection of all animals. (Applause)

“I am afraid that the practice of vivisection in this
country is increasing in volume, and I believe that this is largely due to
encouragement and help from one of our Government departments - the Ministry of
Health. In this connec­tion, also, it would be well to notice the vastly
preponderating attention and con­sideration given by the B.B.C. - a concern
working under license by the Gov­ernment - to supporters of vivisection, as
compared with their attitude to those who condemn and oppose it. For reasons not
redounding to the credit of Parlia­ment, the Ministry of Health has been
presented with practically autocratic powers in very many matters concerning
the mental and physical well-being of the people of this country. "

---------

As to the induction of labour by the injection of
ovarian extracts: "Such ex­periments have been almost uniformly successful
when applied to animals such as the rodents, but they have been a complete
failure in the human subject." (Drs. A. Layland Robinson, M.M. Datnow, and
T.N.A. Jeffcoate, Hon. Sur­geons, Liverpool Hospital for Women, British
Medical Journal, Apr.l3, 1935, p.749)

"Regarding the endocrine preparations, although
there have been lately some very important discoveries, great care must be
taken in using them. There has been much dangerous misuse in this respect
because of the hurried applica­tion of animal experiments to man, and also
because of the streams of propa­ganda flowing from the various pharmaceutical
firms." (Dr. A.P. Cawadias, Medical World, Apr.5, 1935, p.191)

"The title of the article, to begin with, is open
to argument. It has never been satisfactorily explained why, in spite of the
almost universal use of insulin in diabetes since 1923, the death-rate from
this disease has been steadily rising year by year, not only in this country
and in Canada (the land of insulin's birth), but in other civilized countries
where statistics are obtainable.

“Varied excuses have been made for this, but the
awkward fact remains. It is interesting in this connection to note the analogy
of insulin with diph­theria antitoxin. The latter has held sway for upwards of
40 years, and only in the last decade has it been admitted, and this on no less
an authority than lead­ing articles in the British Medical Journal, that
antitoxin has failed in its promises, and that both the total mortality from
diphtheria and the case mor­tality have been rising in spite of the general use
of the ' specific'.

“One has to note, however, that this admission
was not made until a sub­stitute was to hand, viz., anatoxin, which is now, of
course, being universally extolled. As a matter of fact, substitutes for
insulin have already been evolved and put forward as superior to the original,
but it will probably be some years yet before the momentum with which insulin
was launched will have expended it­self.

“It is reasonable to infer, however, that when
it is recommended in various quarters that a substance be replaced by a
substitute, the said substance must have some very obvious and incontrovertible
drawbacks, quite apart, be it said, from its failure to stem the rising
death-rate.

“First of all, it is no longer claimed that insulin
is a cure for diabetes. It is a sort of feeding which must be continued usually
for the remainder of the pa­tient's life, and moreover injected under the skin
twice or perhaps three times a day.

“One sentence in the article reads, ‘May 16,
1921, and here he was at last, a scientist. ‘

“Can Banting and his discoveries claim to be
scientific? Here is what one in­dependent observer at any rate thinks of it. He
is a Dr. Roberts, who, writing from the Cambridge Physiological Laboratory to
the British Medical Journal, says, 'the production of insulin originated
in a wrongly conceived, wrongly con­ducted, wrongly interpreted series of
experiments and gross misreading of those experiments.’

“And a writer in the Lancet stated,
'unfortunately the condition of a dog with a small, but healthy, part of his
pancreas left is essentially different from that of a person suffering from
diabetes,' and he goes on to say that' in human diabetes two factors are
present: (1) an essentially progressive lesion absent in ex­perimental animals,
and (2) the detrimental effect of improper diet.'

“In fact, insulin and the methods by which it
was discovered cannot be scien­tific, since, as is the case with all
experiments on animals, the conditions under which the work is done and the
morbid processes produced are artificial, they bear no analogy to what obtains
in human subject.

"They (gastric and duodenal ulcers) never
occur naturally in animals, and they are hard to reproduce experimentally. They
have been so produced, but usually by methods of gross damage that have no
relation to any possible cau­sative factor in man; moreover, these experimental
ulcers are superficial and heal rapidly, and bear little resemblance to the
indurated chronic ulcers we see in our patients." (Dr. W. H. Ogilvie,
Consulting Surgeon to Guy's Hospital, TheLancet, Feb. 23,1935,
p. 419)

-----------

"Digitalis is invaluable in cases of
cardiac insufficiency associated with ar­terial sclerosis. Too long we were
taught otherwise, thanks to erroneous appli­cation of the results of animal
experiments to man." (Review, Medical World, Feb. 8, 1935,p. 724)

Dr. med. W. Weyneth, dentist, Zurich:
"Nowhere do the catastrophic con­sequences of intellectualism, with its
potential decadence, appear more pain­fully than in the field of medicine,
biology and physiology. They want to re­search the nature of Life, and think
they can discover this from the mangled body of a defenceless living animal
that has been tortured to death." (Zurich, Dec. 15, 1934)

Prof. Enrico Ricca-Barberis, M.D., clinician in
Turin: "Vivisection is an abomination, a disgrace and a real crime. We
have the right, indeed the holy obligation, to fight it and to demand its
abolition...There are a heap of reasons which show that vivisection is not an
educative method, and they are the following: the indifference towards pain,
which can develop into brutal cynicism and derision of pain; the open insult to
the weak, which ac­knowledges no limits and no qualms of conscience, absolutely
sure of going un­punished; the holding back from any impulse or instinct to
hurry on compas­sionate grounds to the aid of the animals' heart-rending
pleading to be saved; the approval given to exceedingly cruel and criminal
actions; the performance of brutality in the full meaning of that word, in
hundreds of different forms; self­ish and repulsive distortion of the
expressions 'honesty' and 'justice'; the triumph of violence and cowardice. And
finally, the practical use of immoral forms of expression and language and, in
some cases, incitement to evil tend­encies, sadism and criminality."

G. Bouzom, M.D., formerly Head of the Surgical
Clinic at Bordeaux University, etc.: "Scientifically, one cannot state
with any certainty that conclu­sions can necessarily be drawn as to the
similarity of human and animal reac­tions on the basis of animal experiments.
This objection was made by a scho­lar, with reference to a particular case
about experimental stomach tumours in the dog. He said: 'How can one deduce
facts from this about the situation with­in the human stomach tumour, because
all the special experimental circumstan­ces in which the animals are placed
simply never arise for the human being?'" (From a letter to the journal Le
Defenseur des Animaux. Paris, Oct. 20, 1934, p.6)

Dr. E. H. Blakeney: "I was already an opponent of
vivisection when I stu­died in Cambridge. I had connections with the great
minds Robert Browning, Ruskin, Tennyson, Martineau, Lord Shaftesbury and
others, who all sympath­ised with those who fought against vivisection. Ruskin
even renounced a pro­fessorship in Oxford as a protest against the practice of
vivisection in that University." (The Record, Sept.21, 1934)

Edward Pittwood, M.D.(dentistry), of Spokane,
Washington, U.S.A., in a letter to the Humanitarian and Antivivisection
Review, July-Sept 1934: "On reading through my letters sent to you,
you will see why I did not give a detailed description of certain disease germs
introduced into the teeth of dogs. I consider this procedure to be useless,
just as I consider vivisection to be useless, because such experiments prove
nothing. An experiment on animals is simply not to be compared with a test made
on humans, for the two belong to different species."

Dr. G. H. Walker, M.R.C.P., Sunderland (Member of the
Royal Society of Medicine):

"I assume that everybody well knows that an ever
growing num­ber of competent men and women and cultured people, belonging to
all bran­ches of art, science and literature, loathe and condemn vivisection.
It is known that among the experts the doubt is constantly growing as to the
relationship be­tween vivisection and medical science...

“An enormous number of valuable advances in the field
of medicine are made by us without resorting to animals, and even less to
vivisection...

“As far as diabetes is concerned, I can speak with
particular authority. I have used insulin since the first day it was
discovered. The research into diabetes via vivisection began in 1889. More than
30 years later, as the result of more or less advanced vivisectional
experiments, the discovery of insulin was proclaimed. Today, insulin is the
main argument used by the vivisectors. As a result of data gathered from
clinical experience I can assert, without having to fear any refu­tation that
insulin, which was obtained after 30 years of vivisection, is neither a remedy
nor a means of prevention against diabetes, but is only an irksome therapeutical
surrogate. (CIVIS: Diabetes has prodigiously increased since the introduction
of in­sulin.)

“I have already said that to use the expressions'
medicine' and 'vivisection' together is a slander and a defamation, and I must
now add that an ever growing number of doctors despise vivisection and have no
belief in it.

“The more one studies the history of medicine, the
more one sees that the real triumphs of medicine are the conclusions of patient
observation of natural phenomena in human beings, and not the consequences of
the confused acti­vities of the experimenters, who draw their conclusions from
the phenomena created artificially in animals...The Russian physiologist Pavlov
carried out experiments on dogs for 25 years. His work is a monument of naivety...Vivisection
confirms with pedantry truths that which has been known since the times of
Adam...

“The way I view vivisection, it seems to me that it
has put back the clinical application of new remedies. Eight years ago some
Americans announced the treatment of anaemia with liver preparations.

“The preparation was tried out on many animals - as
usual, on dogs. Their blood was extracted We now ask ourselves for what purpose
they made use of even one single dog for research into anaemia? Liver is not
poisonous, and there are a large number of humans who suffer from anaemia. It
would have been possible, working by clinical methods, at least to carry out an
experiment on the sick human being himself. We ask ourselves why the clinicians
did not simply give the liver to the sick patients, so as to conduct a
conclusive experiment? ... In the past 50 years energy and money have been used
for performing ex­perimental research on the stomachs, kidney and hearts of
animals, and yet we do not know the cause of many illnesses from which man
suffers in those same organs. Is it not time to look at the income and
expenditure on this balance sheet, so as to see whether the amount that
vivisection has cost us tallies with what it has given us in return? My
definitive opinion is that vivisection is of total insignificance for medi­cal
study...” (Scienza e Coscienza No.3, Sept. 1934)

------------

From an article by yet another medical authority, the
late Dr. J. Stenson Hooker, M.D., in the Abolitionist of July, 2, 1934:

"As a medical man (and, I may interpolate, of 55
years' standing) you will expect the medical aspect of the question to be dealt
with mostly. You have heard from Mr. Hamilton Fyfe, in the first place, that it
took him a long time to come to any decision upon the matter. It took me (and I
will tell you presently) just one minute to make my decision.

“Now, we heard nothing and we knew nothing of
vivisection when we were at the hospital. The only case in which it was
employed, that I know of, was at a lecture in physiology when a rabbit was
shown in the course of the lecture pinned down and cut open in the chest to
show the beat of the heart. I believe that has been carried on in course after
course and perhaps year after year.! did not see the usefulness of it, because
a rabbit is riot a man. (Hear, hear.) It has not the same rhythm; it has not
the same rate of heartbeat, or the same condi­tions at all.

“To pass from that: Later in life I was being coached
for the higher degree of M.D., and this included physiology and one of the
matters that arose from my coach was this, that he went into the question of
how long certain very sen­sitive organs in a horse can be squeezed before it
faints (cries of 'oh!') Now, that was an eye-opener, and I said: If this is
anything like vivisection I have done with it once and for all. (Applause.) It
was so devilish that it went to my very heart. At the same time, I knew it to
be useless 'from the medical side. I have also, I am glad to say, a little
feeling left in my nature.

“Well, we went on, and then came the big question when
I came to London and got a general practice and went into the whole theory and
the whole study of it More and more every day, almost every hour that I lived,
I have been cor­roborated in my belief that there is nothing whatever of use in
vivisection. (Ap­plause.)

“Now with regard to diabetes. I was sorry to read the
other day the most astonishing assertion that Dr. Banting was the man who
'conquered diabetes'­ those were the words. I was very sorry to see that,
because that was read by mil­lions, or, at any rate, by more than a million.
No, friends, diabetes has not been conquered, and medical men themselves are
coming to admit that. They say in­sulin is no cure. They admit that it may stay
it; it may put it back for a time, but it is not a cure. Contrary to that
statement there are statistics which actually show that diabetes is on the
up-grade. in spite of your insulin and every other method that has been tried.

“Yet we have cures from India; we have cures from
Australia, and I believe there are other countries which are sending over
simple plant medicines which have been known to cure diabetes, but we cannot
get these things before the medical profession. I spent a whole year in writing
my Newer Practice in Me­dicine, and it has been what is commonly called
a frost. I had good notices, but the medical men will not have it; they will
not look at it; but we must go on to the best of our ability in using these
newer methods.

“In June 1934 the Institute of Experimental Surgery
was inaugurated by some scientists in Buenos Aires. Questioned about this
institute, RamonP. Silva M.D. of Buenos Aires answered as follows:
"The human being has a peculiar somatic (bodily) structure, as is seen
from observation, study and experiment. The body is the first stage, whether in
topographical, operative or necroscopic anatomy. We have gathered enough
experience. we learn from the sick patient, by fol­lowing the lessons of those
who already have knowledge, and do this by prac­tice, at first under the
guidance of the expert. Only then can one make use of the rights that one has
gained through one's title, starting with what is simple and then moving on to
the complicated. The doctor must always be mindful of the suffering of his
patients. He must strictly avoid any unnecessary suffering and all his
attention and science must be aimed at bringing about improvement in his
patient.

“The unnecessary experiments on animals with toxins
(poisonous substan­ces), bacteria, drugs, etc., and even more so vivisection,
kill that spiritual leader­ship which binds us to ethics and compassion....

“When one operates on animals (vivisection) one is
working on organisms which are very different from ours. One is working on
healthy organs and on tissues which are functioning physiologically, whereas
one operates on a human being because he is ill, because his organs and tissues
show great changes, de­generation, ulcers and so on. These are not
physiological conditions. One does not earn one's living as a surgeon by
practising vivisection, but by operating on creatures like oneself, guided by a
sound knowledge of the causes that have brought about the physiological
disturbance and by the endeavour to find the best way of healing without
altering the relationship and interdependence which exists between tissues,
organs, glands and so on.

“The experience and the development of human skills,
and the thorough knowledge of pathology from which the knowledge of the healing
method for each individual case is derived, form the basis of surgical
knowledge and of me­dicine in general. For these and other reasons I repeat
that vivisection, carried out in good faith or criminally, as well as the
experiments performed on any liv­ing creature, destroy that feeling that is
part and parcel of a civilised person. Carrying out surgery on sick animals
produces an experienced veterinarian, but performing it on healthy animals on
the pretext of aquiring surgical dexterity for human beings is an untruthful
fabrication, if not an exercise in a sickly sport.” (From Scienza e
Coscienza, No. 1,1934)

-----------

Dr. Gennaro Ciaburri, doctor and surgeon, Bologna:
"ls vivisection in­dispensable for teaching purposes? That is the greatest
myth, one which you should attach no credence to.”

Dr. med. Renaud, former medical assistant in the
Department of Medicine and Surgery, special assistant for the study of cancer
at the Cantonal Hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland: "l am of the opinion
that vivisection should be banned from the courses and practical work at the
medical faculties.” (L'Antivivisectionniste, No.4, Dec. 1934)

Prof. E. Ricca-Barberis, physician, Turin: "The
victim of curare (arrow poison) is totally paralised and incapable of making
any movement, although he is fully conscious and retains his sensitivity to
pain; he then dies of asphyx­iation as a result of paralysis of the respiratory
muscles. It is therefore easy to understand why this poison has become the
vivisector's most diabolical aid. One only needs to set up artificial breathing
and then one has a complete ex­perimental object for the vivisection bench,
fully alive and conscious, but, un­able to move in the slightest. even when in
extreme anxiety and dreadful pain....Only one conclusion is possible. As a
method of instruction vivisection is, apart from being unavoidably immoral and
scandalous, also totally useless and even harmful. These demonstrations can and
must be totally abolished." (L'idea Zoofila, Milan, May 1934)

Medical Times, March 1934, leading article on 'Vivisection':
"Will any unprejudiced physician state that we have advanced one single
step in solving the cancer question? Thousands of pounds have been spent or
animal experiments in this branch of research, but without practical
result…Carefully ela­borated theories may be developed, but they lead to no
practical result and the deaths from cancer meanwhile multiply. It is useless
to continue in such a way with costly research."

"Then there is the physiologist. Here we are up
against the most flagrant example of the uselessness of animal
experiments...Such experiments lead us nowhere. In fact, they hamper the
progress of medical science." (Leading ar­ticle, Medical Times, Mar.
1934 p.37)

Dr. L.A. Parry delivered a talk about vivisection on
Mar.2, 1934 in Brighton, England. According to the Sussex Daily News his
conclusions were as follows: "I am convinced that vivisection is not only
useless, but also harm­ful. It does not promote the advance of medicine, but
impedes it."

"The testing of drugs on experimental animals is
very apt to give fallacious results in the case of human beings. By animal
experimentation, it was for long regarded that digitalis raised the blood
pressure. We now know that it does noth­ing of the sort. In fact pharmacology
has been greatly hampered by these ex­periments, and is still being held back
by the preference given to animal experi­ments rather than to clinical
observation." (Medical Times, Mar. 1934, p.37.)

Dr. OIga Alcott Wilhelm wrote as follows, under the
heading Worthless Vivisection, in the Chicago Daily News of
Feb.26, 1934: "I am a doctor and sur­geon and as a student I had to work
on animals in laboratories. But I can hon­estly say that none of my colleagues
had the impression of having widened his knowledge through this mass murder of
dogs. Why? Because the time allowed is too short, the student is unprepared for
the surgical intervention, the dogs are not properly anaesthetised; after the
experiment they are in a pitiful situation. No antiseptics are used, nobody
investigates the result of the surgical procedure, which is necessarily
different from the treatment of humans due to the anatomi­cal differences. The
mass slaughter of dogs should be abolished. Why are dogs used? Be­cause they
are devoted and loyal, as well as easy to obtain without the univer­sity
incurring heavy costs."

"For many years, at great expense, cancer
research has been carried out by large numbers of devoted workers in the
laboratories of this and other countries. The continued failure of
distinguished scientists to obtain any useful results, so far as the disease in
man is concerned, shows that they must be working on un­fruitful lines
suggested by false conceptions of the nature of this human scourge." W.
MitcheIl Stevens, M.D. F.R.C.P., British Medical Journal, Feb. 24, 1934,
p.352.

"Many people do not see the moral side of the
question; so we must con­vince them by presenting the scientific arguments. On
the scientific side, the whole basis of vivisection rests on the assumption
that it is possible to apply scientific conclusions from animals to humans.
There are countless examples that contradict this assumption." (From Abolitionist.
Feb. 1, 1934, p.14)

The February 1934 issue of Medical Times writes:
"We declare without hesitation that progress in medicine is
extraordinarily impeded by many of these absolutely worthless
experiments."

Dr. med. dent. Gaston Guerard, Doctor of the
University of Paris, Pro­fessor of Dentistry and of Human and Comparative
Anatomy at the Den­tal School of France; Dental Surgeon of the Medical Faculty
of Paris, Vice­ President of Anatomical Section at the 8th International Congress
of Den­tistry, holder of the Medal of the Ministry of Public Health and of the
Medal of Honour for Public Welfare, wrote as follows in 1934 in his treatise on
the futility and cruelty of the experiments on dogs' teeth planned by the
Interna­tional Dental Federation (the treatise won him a prize awarded by the
'Bureau International Humanitaire Zoophile'):

(pages 22-25) "At present (and in view of the
expansion of our physiologi­cal knowledge) vivisection could not perform any
service either to surgery or to medicine. This truth, stated by practitioners
of undisputed competence, is based on what is called the 'biological
personality'. Important scientific papers confirm the view that the reaction to
a stimulant is specific and not common to all creatures.

“In these circumstances, vivisection is, whether one
likes it or not, nothing else but a useless and crude procedure, a pointless
one even, due to the anatomi­cal-physiological dissimilarities, as recently
expressed by one of the long est­ablished French medical journals. By the way,
the physiologists admit them­selves that their research method 'would be cruel'
if it did not have the good of mankind as its aim.

“The cruelty of the experiments proposed by the
'International Dental Feder­ation' is undisputed, as we have amply
demonstrated. These experiments are not only useless, but are also immoral”.

Dr. Guerard reached the following conclusions:

"Our conclusions will be short:

“1. The principles on which the experiment is based
are false throughout. In reality, the biological similarities which the
'International Dental Federation' think exist between the teeth of human beings
and those of the other mammals (particularly of dogs) do not in fact exist.

“2.The prescribed experimental method is contrary to
scientific truth and is therefore a source of errors.

“3.The results obtained will therefore be of
absolutely no worth from the scientific viewpoint. A false starting basis leads
to misleading experiments, and these unfailingly lead to a negative final
result

“4.These worthless experiments are also cruel; they
will inevitably cause pain, because as a result of the multiple focuses of
infection this will be in­creased by the operations carried out under narcosis.
The suffering is inesca­pable, and is actually an integral part of the
conditions for the experiments; it is also of long duration and extremely
severe."

"To
show by further example the completeness with which observations on man himself
must govern the establishment of medical remedies, digitalis is named, for
which there is not more valuable remedy in the pharmacopoeia today...The most
essential information, the profound effect which digitalis is capable of
exerting in auricular fibrillation, could not have been won through observation
on the frog or normal mammal, but only as it was won, by obser­vation on
patients" (Dr. Thomas Lewis, Surgeon Clinical Science, Shaw and
Sons, Ltd., London, 1934, pp. 188-9)

------------

Prof.
De Castro, M.D., Valence, France: "It is extremely unscientific, and at
the same time cruel and absurd, to state that the physiological reactions of
the animals can serve to bring relief to the very sensitive human organism. The
mountains of animal corpses are nothing else but the burnt offering of bloody
vivisection. Under idle pretexts, a jumble of stupidity is created upon which a
civilisation that boasts of its culture erects
its monument!" (Scienza e Coscien­za No.6, 1934).

“Looked at from the scientific viewpoint, the
vivisection question is resolved in less than a minute: the dog is not
comparable with the human being, either from the anatomical or physiological or
even from the pathological standpoint. It is completely different from the human
being and in no respect similar to him. I would even state that we learn
nothing, absolutely nothing, from the vivisec­tion demonstrations given to us
at medical schools, unless it is errors! I can as­sure you that I am not the
only one who thinks in this way." (Quartely bulletin of the International
Antivivisection League, Brussels, 1934, No.41).

From the statement of Dr. Fergie Woods, in a doctors'
debate at the Town Hall of Colchester, G.B. Dec. 8,1933:

"There are a good many who do not see the moral aspect
at all, and one must endeavour to convince them on the scien­tific side. The
whole basis of vivisection on the scientific side is an assumption that it is
possible to argue scientifically from animal to man. There are innumer­able
instances which contradict that assumption. I want to give you two or three
instances to show you what a misleading thing that assumption can be. I want to
take the three great diseases tuberculosis, syphilis and cancer.

“With regard to syphilis there are two facts: the result
of clinical observation and the result of observation of human beings, which no
one would dream of refuting, because they are absolutely irrefutable. Syphilis
in human beings is a disease which is capable of attacking most parts of the
body. There is hardly a part of the body which is immune. The second point is
that it is almost the only disease acquired hereditarily, from mother to child.
A few years ago, experi­ments were made upon rabbits in this connection.
Rabbits were inoculated with syphilitic poison. Of course, rabbits and other
animals are not attacked by sy­philis, and it is an artificial thing to make
them syphilitic. But it was found as a result of this experiment that the
disease when inoculated remained strictly local, and 'was not transmitted to
the progeny. So if we were trying to base our knowl­edge of syphilis on animal
experiments, we should be led utterly astray. In con­sumption, one of the
recent treatments which has been found successful in tuber­culosis of the lungs
is that known as artificial pneumothorax, that is, the injec­tion of gas of
some kind to give the lung rest. These experiments were also per­formed on
rabbits, and as a result it was found that not only did the artificial
pneumothorax not stop the disease but it became more rapid and more fatal. So
there again, if we had based our treatment of human beings on experiments on
animals, many lives might have been lost.

“Then we come to cancer, and I suppose cancer accounts
for more experi­ments on animals - the present time than any other one disease.
It is difficult to say how long these experiments have been going on. To give a
conservative estimate, say a quarter-of a century; hundreds of thousands of
animals must have been used, but they have not yet succeeded in inducing human
cancer in an ani­mal. Tumors of various kinds, yes, but nothing approaching
human cancer. For another example of the futility of these experiments there is
the striking instance of the Copenhagen experimenter, who conceived the idea of
producing tu­mours in rats by means of injecting a parasite obtained from
cockroaches. After many experiments he succeeded in producing some sort of a
tumor, but could not get a tumour in black rats, but only in black-and-white
rats, piebald rats. So it is not only different animals, but different species
of the same animal that have different reactions. How much more difference
there is between animal and man!

“...Many eminent men are beginning to say in the
medical press what they think. For instance, in the Harveian Oration, delivered
before the Royal College of Physicians of London, on October 18, Sir Thomas
Lewis made the follow­ing statement: ‘A method of studying human disease,
advocated since Claude Bernard's time, is first to reproduce such disease in a
lower animal, and then to proceed to investigate it in that animal. In theory
ideal, in practice this is rarely possible of full accomplishment. Strictly
speaking, you cannot, by cutting or trying operations, reproduce any human
disease other than one arising out of in­jury. It is possible to produce
disease closely akin to that seen in man by intro­ducing into animals the
original agent of the human disease, bacterial or other­wise, or by withdrawing
some essential from the diet; but because the animal and its reactions are
different, the disease is not accurately reproduced.’

“Dr. Mitchell Stephens had an article in the Medical
World a week or two ago, and stated that 'the results of drug experiments
upon animals were, as far as their application to man was concerned, absolutely
useless and misleading, and until there is a reaction from this state of
affairs no great progress in the art of medicine can be effected.’ The
insistence on the result of animal experiments in the education of medical
students is having a bad effect, and the reliance upon the laboratory finding
as against the clinical is harmful to the best interests of the patient and
deleterious to medicine generally.” (The Abolitionist. Feb. I, 1934)

-----------

"My own conviction is that the study of human
physiology by way of ex­periments on animals is the most grotesque and
fantastic error ever committed in the whole range of human intellectual
activity." (Dr. G. F. Walker, Medical World, Dec.8, 1933, p.365)

"It is almost a hundred years since Raynard, a
veterinary surgeon at Lyons, discovered that removal of the thyroid gland in
dogs was rapidly fatal. Fifty years later, Schiff showed that while this was
true of cats as well as dogs, it was not true of rabbits and rats."
(Leading article, The Lancet, Dec. 2, 1933, p.1267).

"As regards feeding and other experiments upon
animals with these sub­stances (vitamins), the results obtained, whatever they
may be, can be of little useful application to the prevention and treatment of
disease in man." W. Mit­chell Stevens, M.D. F.R.C.P., Medical World, Dec.
1, 1933, p.335

"Experimental pharmacology is now receiving State
aid, but the results of drug experiments upon animals are, as far as their
application to man is con­cerned, absolutely useless and even misleading."
W. Mitchell Stevens, M.D. F.R.C.P., Medical World, Dec. 1, 1933 p.335

"As I gathered more knowledge and accumulated a
cer­tain amount of wisdom, I gradually came to realise the uselessness and
immor­ality of vivisection, and my difficulty now is to deal with the
multiplicity of reasons against it.

“The moral side can be dealt with by anyone who tries
to understand and live according to the plan on which our world has been
created and is being carried on, realising that the rights of the higher
creatures imply responsibilities toward the lower, and the duty of helping the
lower ones on in their evolution.

“From a professional pen, the scientific side is the
one to be stressed. To begin with, can the reactions of even the most highly
evolved mammals be as­sumed to be the same as those of human beings? Even
different races of men suffer pain and illness in different ways. A North
American Indian has been known to endure an amount of torture going beyond what
would kill a Euro­pean from shock. Still greater is the difference between a
human being and what is called one of the lower animals. It is well known that
some drugs poisonous to men are harmless to other animals, and vice versa. When
Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, tested his drugs, he did so on himself,
and so obtained more accurate information as to their properties than he would
have done had he tested them on animals.

“...The time, effort
and money that are expended today on vivisection could be used more
advantageously for other methods.”

Dr. Petrie Hoyle, from the Medical World. Oct.
6,1933: "I am pleased to have contact again with the work against this
extraordinar­ily absurd and inhuman system called vivisection...My course is
directed at those leaders of orthodox medicine and vivisection who dominate the
'masses' of the medical fraternity by refusing them the right to form their own
judgement and opinion."

Dr. Pibre, Surgeon at the hospitals in Nimes, France,
wrote the following to the Nimes Animal Welfare Society on Sept29, 1933:
"My surgical prac­tice, which I have been engaged in for 12 years, has so
toughened me that none can accuse me of faint-heartedness or sentimentality.
Having made this import­ant point, I can say openly and unhesitatingly what I
think about vivisection. Vivisection is a gross mistake and cannot be defended
by anything, regardless of whether one speaks of animal experiments for medical,
surgical or dental pur­poses."

"To draw analogies between the pathogenesis of
poliomyelitis in man and the experimental disease in monkeys might lead us far
astray...We know from other diseases, such as yellow fever, that a virus might
behave very differentlyin different
hosts. "Dr. Jean Macnamara, TheLancet, Aug. 19, 1933
pp.421-2.

"It so happens that the whole of our knowledge of
the structure, symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of the neoplasias (cancers) of
man comes from those who approach the subject by direct clinical methods. To
this extensive knowl­edge the contribution of laboratory experimentalists is
practically nil." (Dr. Hastings Gilford, Surgeon, TheLancet. July
15, 1933, p.157)

Alonzo Austin M.D., (of New York, former physician to
John D. Rocke­feller):

"...How can great things be achieved by the
medical profession when such cruel experiments are performed on poor, helpless
animals, to which we are under such an obligation for proven services? In times
of war dogs have gone across desolated territory with messages; they guide
blind soldiers, rescue drowning children, protect us day and night…But in times
of their own sorrow and suffering they have no power to demand their rights
before a Supreme Court; they receive no compensation for useless
experimentation. Are they to be nailed needlessly to the Cross on account of
the sins of our incorrect style of living and our violations of the laws of
Nature?" (Humanitarian and Antivivisection Review, Apr. - Jun.
1933, p.85)

Dr. G. F. Walker, doctor at the Royal Hospital and at
the Children's Hos­pital, Sunderland:

"...I now come to the most serious charges that I
have to level against medi­cal training. During his whole period of study it is
impressed on the medical stu­dent, mostly by teachers with financial interests,
that knowledge of the human body can only be achieved by observing and carrying
out animal experiments. Now I know quite well that animal experiments are
condemned on all sides on emotional, moral and ethical grounds. For the moment
I will not concern my­self with these matters of dispute, however reasonable
they may be. My own conviction is that the study of human physiology by way of
experiment on ani­mals is the most grotesque and fantastic error ever committed
in the whole range of human intellectual activity. Like all such errors, this
one is defended by its supporters either with presumptuous and confused
fanaticism or with self-opi­nionated excitedness. But this way of thinking is
made out to the student to be a public-spirited and unbiased keenness for
truth. The fact is that most students, although they are not aware of it, are
damaged for life in their mental abilities as soon as they have once been
persuaded to pay physiology more than the super­ ficial interest that is taught
to them in conventional medical studies; one of the most saddening phenomena is
the otherwise good-natured and reasonable stu­dent who passionately defends
animal experiments because his teachers, who have a financial interest in such
experiments, have transfer- red their depravity to him on the strength of their
position and personality. " (From his article Reflection on the
Training of Doctors in Medical World, Oct. 6, 1933)

"I am strongly opposed to the experiments on dogs
in medical and surgical research. I am of the opinion that the much-discussed
research based on animal experiments is crude, and far removed from true
science. Much too much value is attached to animal experiments in the training
of the doctor. I know that my opinions are shared by thousands of practising
doctors of both sexes..." (Medical World. Mar.3, 1933)

"People were, out of reverence and admiration for
the results of medical science, accustomed - and a certain portion of the Press
does this deliberately - to consider its representatives as semi-gods, whose
actions were sacrosanct from the ethical viewpoint because their efforts were
after all serv­ing suffering Mankind. We young medical students, who chose the
profession of doctor out of enthusiasm for its lofty ideals, thought exactly
the same. We had no idea that our revered teachers, through their experiments
on animals, were punching ethics in the face and, through their cruelty and
heartlessness to­wards the innocent creatures, doing exactly the same as the
Druids did to the old Celts when they acted according to the law which stated:
'Prisoners of war shall be slain at the altars or be cast into the flames... '

“One shakes one's head in disbelief at the
backwardness of a culture that still makes use of such atrocities. We attend
highly aesthetic, philosophical and ar­tistic lectures, we let ourselves be
pleased or shocked at the theatre or opera, listen to the sublime soaring tones
of the church organ, the solemn singing of the choirs, go through the finest
sensations of spiritual life when we read an aes­thetic book, admire a
painting, wander happily in the open air, are exhilarated by the enjoyment of
Nature, experience all the qualities of inner movement ­but all this time, in
the basements of the University institutes and many hospi­tals, the groaning
dogs are biting in pain at the iron bars of their cages after coming to from
the anaesthetic, they are writhing in unspeakable agony on their straw bedding,
they are dragging themselves whimpering to the water bowl so as to cool their
thirsting tongues, or are showing in their such very devoted canine eyes the
madness of despair when the cleverly placed gadgets prevent 'them from easing
the unbearable itching of their wounds with parrying move­ments; other animals
brood apathetically, shuddering again and again with painful convulsions,
maimed, tom apart and poisoned, or must run day and night, to the point of exhaustion,
in the revolving drum, endure frightful bum wounds, hunger and thirst, freezing
and asphyxiation experiments until they are often only finally released from
their suffering by a merciful death. Anyone who has once seen this must,
doubting in God, clench his fist at the most vicious of all creatures, homo
sapiens, and vow to help expose the brutality of such a piti­less and
hypocritical science with all his might, and to help eradicate such a crime
against civilisation. How empty and hollow must any honours and titles appear
that are striven for and achieved on the basis of such shamefulness! Where can
there be any excuse for such an abomination? Only the soul blind­ness - not in
the medical sense - of the doctors, only their blindness of soul to­wards such
a shaming of science and all humanity, of true humanity, can ex­cuse this or
make it at least explicable.

“However, as the defenders of this horrific means of
research are immunised against feelings of compassion and are deaf, I have
preferred to show, in their language and plain way of thinking, what dangerous
sources of error animal ex­periments are, how many people have been killed
because of them and how un­necessary they now appear to be in the judgement of
many doctors with mod­em training." (1933)

--------

Dr. med. Steintel, Berlin, on "International
Medical Policy":

"Some 50,000 people earn a living in Germany as
doctors, and they are joined by an additional 15,000 each year, so that there
will soon be 60,000 doctors, which means one doctor to 1000 inhabitants. Can
that mean that we are healthy? In order to feed the doctors, to provide them
with work through illness, one has to get iller and iller. The number of
doctors must be reduced if this situation is to be ended. In order to practice
their 'art' the medical profession requires millions of animals for torture, on
whose sufferings their science is based.

“But when it dawned on some people that the system was
rotten, and clear­sighted individuals fought against it, the medical profession
also saw that their livelihood was being threatened. Their medical policy is
primarily the line of withholding information. 'The amount of information to be
given is determined by us,' said Dr. med. Neustedter.

“The prerequisite for today's medical policy is
naturally the currently domi­nant system of medicine. The sick are the source
of income, therefore it is necessary for sick people to be there, yes, it
proves advantageous if one makes the people artificially sick.

“Hundreds and thousands of perjuries have been
committed via scientifically false reports. I say this, because I can prove it.
By means of these the high stand­ing of the doctors is forced on the public.
Damage thus comes about as a result of vaccination, and is constantly proven.
But it is portrayed in a very toned down form by official sources. Since 1930
many doctors have declared themselves opposed to vaccination. But the
vaccination law continues to prevail. In many German States there is compulsory
vaccination, although even the supporters of vaccination were originally
against compulsion. In 1929 it so happened that a father abducted his own child
three times so as to save it from the persecu­tions of those who wanted to use
force in order to vaccinate the child. For the fourth time the officials
succeeded in taking the child for vaccination, they dragged it out of the car.
After the vaccination encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) set in, and
within eight days the child was dead! In this way vaccination has at times
become a legally sanctioned judicial murder, committed by custo­dians of the
law. Vaccination can, as has been proven, cause encephalitis.”

-----------

Prof. Theodor Lessing, Dr. med., Dr. phil., Hanover:

"This science, which so prides itself on its
exactness, is in truth unbearably muddled.

“One good example of this rupture between physiology
and bacteriology, and of all the accompanying confusion, is provided by the
history of the fight against tuberculosis. Just as the triumphant advance in
bacterial research began with the so often lauded discovery of the tuberculosis
bacillus by Robert Koch, so has research into tuberculosis first seen success
at the point when the premises on which bacteriology is based are now suddenly
becoming dubious. I need only refer to the colossal work of Sauerbruch, whose
research on bone tuberculosis certainly arouses suspicion that this researcher,
starting from the ideas inaugur­ated by Koch, arrived year by year and stage by
stage at new viewpoints, until finally nothing more remained of the serum
therapy and a nutritional sickness called for help, the sickness: poverty, the
demand by the great masses for re­forms of feeding and living conditions.

“It is astonishing how a researcher of Paul
Uhlenhuth's rank either fails to recognise or falsifies these relationships.
For him, the present treatment of beri­beri or pellagra is "the triumph of
animal experimentation." And in reality pre­cisely the opposite is the
case. It was precisely these metabolic diseases that first made clear the
senselessness of the chaotic torture experiments on animals. When Joe
Goldberger first came on the idea in 1923 that pellagra, even if it was
transmitted by a specific bacterium or had a connection with bacteria, could
nevertheless only be a metabolic disturbance which one could heal by diatetic
and physical therapy, he found himself facing the rage of all the bacteria re­searchers.
But when his thoughts proved to be true, then the bacterial researchers began
to switch course. They now no longer hunted for bacteria, but for 'vita­mins'
(which only amounted to the creation of a new word).

“They had sacrificed whole hecatombs of animals. It
now clearly emerged that this had been done unnecessarily. All that would have
been needed was simply to alter people's way of life. I don't want to speak
here about the figures which every serum-injection fanatic and every protege of
the chemical indus­try can serve up at any given moment. No person can ever
check on these figures. They say: ‘Figures are proof!’ But they should add: ‘Of
everything and any­thing.’ When Uhlenhuth so wittily says: ‘Whereas nobody was
formerly safe from smallpox and love, thanks to compulsory vaccination they
have now dis­appeared completely in Germany, whilst in England (where there is
only vol­untary vaccination) 14,769 cases were still recorded last year,’ no
one can check whether this is correct, because in some English statistics we
read the op­posite: ‘We have no compulsory vaccination, but thanks to our
better hygiene we remain almost totally protected from smallpox so long as this
is not brought in from abroad, whereas in Germany 9,872 children contracted the
disease last year as a result of vaccinations, and several hundred died from
it.’

“What use, for example, has Marion Dorset's abominable
mass murder had in combating foot-and-mouth disease? Around 1900 everyone was
convinced that in order to put an end to an epidemic, one must isolate the
whole herd once one animal falls ill, kill them and burn the bodies. This is
how they acted in America. Millions of animals were wiped out. Even whole
populations of game. There were also scientific fanatics who would have much
preferred to kill off all the syphilis patients, to isolate the sufferers from
consumption, to send all the lepers into the land of pepper. Today we see error
in such barbaric practices. Everyone knows that an epidemic is the penalty for
unnaturalness, for unclean­liness and wrongness of living." (From an
article "The Meaning of Animal Experimentation" in the publi­cation
"The failure of animal experimentation in medicine, especially in com­bating
epidemics," published in 1931 by the Anti- Vivisection Societies of Basle,
Berne and Zurich)

"At this point I wish to refer briefly to the
effects of the greatest crime of civilised mankind, to "scientific animal
torture." Most of our contemporaries are not informed or are misinformed
about it, or they are so concerned with their own problems that, out of
indifference and bitterness, they do not preoc­cupy themselves with the
suffering of the "lower creatures," the animals. Very much to their
own detriment from the health and economic viewpoint!

“For decades the most noble minds and the warmest
hearts have fought in speech and writing for the abolition of vivisection,
attacked animal cruelty and its priests, and despite all this they have so far
achieved precious little. The rea­son for this lack of success lies mostly in
the combination of vivisection with capitalism. Today vivisection is business,
an appalling, sad business!

“The big chemical/pharmaceutical financiers have
almost a monopolistic hold on the medicines market. Vivisection flourishes in
their laboratories. Money, fame and careers are made out of the sufferings of
the laboratory ani­mals. But the law of inherent justice for our actions
inevitably has its repercus­sions on those who benefit from the broken moral
law, i.e. on human society, so long as it tolerates such devilries.

“We do not need any cruelty to animals for healing
purposes. There is no longer any place for torture of people or of animals in
any civilised nation. So long as we still have breath in our bodies: Down with
Vivisection!" (Tierrecht und Tierschutz, No. 4, 1933).

"We demand the unconditional prohibition of all
animal experiments, with severe penalties. The public amateurishly believes in
the orthodox medical fairy tale of the usefulness of animal experimentation for
the art of healing, while the vivisectors, under the pretext of serving this
art of healing, perpetrate the most despicable trickery. The defenders of
vivisection like to speak of the exalted aims of scientific aspiration. The
gentlemen cannot roll their eyes enough, and talk hypocritically about the welfare
of suffering mankind. A poor mankind, that can only keep on its feet by
torturing defenceless animals. The House of Science should be a temple; it has
now become a den of torture, from which the wailing of the animals cries out to
Heaven. He who approaches the Temple of Science with reverence does not do so
in order to attend an orgy of bleeding and mangled animals, who were created
with infinite wisdom and are destroyed with stupid cruelty by so-called
scientists. Because many orthodox doctors cannot conceive of any more worthy
task, because they are not endowed with any bet­ter intuition in their barren
materialism, they become enslaved in the pastime appropriate to their mental
level, torturing people and animals and bestowing their errors and foolishness
on mankind.

“We accuse the State, because it pays for the cowardly
animal slaughter with our money and lets these people carry on their wretched
handiwork. We accuse the Church, because it pursues a head-in-the-sand policy
and acts as if it cannot see that public morality is undermined and destroyed
through its silent condon­ing of animal experiments. " (Tierrecht, 15
December 1932)

Dr. A.J. Maurice, dentist, editor of The Dental
Surgeon, wrote concerning the competition organised by the International
Dental Federation:

"As a dentist with many years of experience I am
convinced that on this question no experiments on dogs' teeth would be of any
value whatever in find­ing a suitable treatment for human teeth." (Abolitionist,
1 November 1932)

From an article in the Lincolnshire Forward of
September 17, 1932 re­printed in the Abolitionist of Nov 1. 1932:

“That vivisection is the most revolting and useless
method of science is ob­vious; yet vivisectors are legally allowed to subject
hundreds of thousands of animals, yearly, to the most horrible torment ever
designed by the cunning mind of science.

“We are assured by our heroes of science that
vivisection is not cruel; that all the experiments are done under anaesthetics;
that the opponents of vivisec­tion are merely trying to thrust back progress;
and that all our knowledge of dis­ease today resulted from vivisection
experiments. What utter nonsense!

“In the first place, it should strike any casual
observer that if these experi­ments were performed without the infliction of
pain, they would, even from the scientists' point of view, be failures. But as
a matter of fact, it is recorded offi­cially that only four per cent of
vivisection experiments are done under anaes­thetics. So much is the
scientists' profession of innocence!

“It makes one feel sick to read of the matter-of-fact
way in which the vivi­sectors publish reports of their abominable deeds.
Animals are compelled to exercise on treadmills after certain internal organs
have been removed; they are baked alive in ovens, and frozen to death in cold
water; they are starved for long periods and fed on insufficient diets so as to
produce deformities, they are dropped from great heights to give them shock;
they are surgically joined together like Siamese twins; they are subjected to
poison gases, drugs and ino­culations, resulting in agonising diseases; they are
- but there, surely these few illustrations are sufficient to make an
anti-vivisector of the least imaginative of readers.

“However, even supposing that this hideous dabbling in
the blood and agony of animals by maniacal scientists could achieve any result,
can we claim that it has been of the slightest benefit to mankind? Has the
cancer problem been solved by decades of cancer induction in mice and monkeys?
Was the tuberculosis death-rate lowered by research work? Of course not!

“The only real advantage that science claims as the
result of vivisection, is the abolition of smallpox by vaccination. Yet it is
obvious to any sane person that smallpox, a filth disease, was abolished by the
removal of filth, and not by the pollution of human blood by poisoned calf
lymph.

“No, it is quite safe to say that no good has ever
resulted from the black magic of science, and that vivisection is not only
useless and cruel, but it positively hinders progress by turning scientists
into criminal maniacs. Disease will not be removed by such beings, but by the
return to a natural and wholesome living. Our greatest minds - in the Labour
Movement alone there are Arthur Hender­son, Lansbury, Kenworthy and many others
- have realised this and call upon the people to stop such a degrading
practice. It is the people's duty to answer that call."

--------

The same issue of the Abolitionist reports:

“After vaccination. After encephalitis, yet another
awkward sequel of vaccination has been discovered! The British Medical
Journal of September 24 reports ‘a very rare se­quel’: ‘The patients were
middle-aged persons between 50 and 65, the subjects of leukaemia or
subleukaemia, who had been vaccinated or revaccinated during their stay in
hospital. The symptoms were both local and general- namely, a violent
inflammatory reaction at the vaccination site, considerable enlargement of the
Iymphatic glands, both in the axilla and elsewhere, and aggravation of the
general condition, as shown by anorexia, more or less considerable rise of tem­perature,
progressive emaciation, and changes in the blood picture consisting in very
pronounced anaemia and intense leucocytosis. Four of the five cases proved
fatal, between two and seven weeks after vaccination. In the only case which
survived, which was one of pure Hodgkin's disease, there was a consider­able
aggravation of the general condition.’”

Still in the same issue of the Abolitionist, about
"Those Dental Experi­ments": Mr A.J. Maurice, J.D., L.D.S. (Editor of
The Dental Surgeon), remarks in a letter to Miss Kidd: "As a dental
surgeon of many years experience, I am convinced that no experiments on dogs'
teeth in this matter would be of any value in finding out treatment suitable to
human teeth."

------------

Dr. Graham-Little: "...It has become a burning
question, whether the nation receives anything like a fair return for the money
which it pays out to support research." (Sunday Observer, 23
October 1932)

Dr. med. Guttman (extract from Biologische
Heilkunst, 1932/10): "Barn-yard medicine has not given us any
vaccination procedure that really protects against illness, but many that
endanger the body, that even bring death."

"In recent years research workers have been
distracted and misled by ani­mal experiments claiming to show that vitamin
deficiency was the cause of this, that, or another thing, when indeed the
actual cause may have been intercurrent disease resulting from the animals
being kept in quite unnatural captivity (la­boratory), and apart from vitamin
deficiencies, fed on unsatisfactory diets, and deprived of exercise, fresh air,
sunlight and perhaps warmth." (Dr. J. Sim Wal­lace, King's College,
London, Report in Medical Press and Circular, Sep. 21, 1932, p.229)

Dr. med. Albert Eckhard (Chairman of the animal
welfare society "Tier­freund", Hanover, and of the Association of
Antivivisectionist Doctors Ger­many):

"...The objection that one must carry out animal
experiments in order not to have to make any experiments on humans also does
not accord with the truth, for the cruel experiments on animals have merely
provided the foundation for the belief that one can also make reprehensible
experiments on human beings. The bad thing is that they have performed the
experiments on people, especially on children of poor folk, to whom they
transmitted tuberculosis, diphtheria, sy­philis and other horrible diseases,
and did not even shrink back from conduct­ing experiments on dying children.
Several thousands were involved in these experiments, often with the most
serious consequences for the "guinea pigs" concerned. The fact that
many doctors are hardly any longer aware of their un­social or really criminal
way of thinking is apparent from the report of a doctor who wrote as follows
about his attempts to inject smallpox: "Perhaps I should have first
conducted experiments on animals, but the suitable animals, i.e. calves, were
difficult to obtain and to keep due to the cost, and so, with the kind
permission of the Senior Physician, I began my experiments on children at the
General Foundling Hospital." (Tierrecht und Tierschutz, No.
9, 20 September 1932)

"Calm and self-controlled though he always was,
he nevertheless became very enraged one day. Before our eyes a doctor, a person
who through his pro­fession should be compassionate towards all those who
suffer, was engaged in his torture laboratory in pouring boiling water over
poor, bound, defenceless and non-anaesthetised dogs. This executioner, one of
the sadists whom we so often discover among the vivisectors, had to break off
his despicable work.

“My dear Edmond, may all that you did to improve the
lot of these defence­less beings help in ensuring that this brutal, barbaric
and cowardly practice, vi­visection, one day disappears from our civilised
nations. May all those who listen to me today in such great numbers think about
this - and assist." (Wiener Tierfreund. Sept. 1932)

“Professor Dr. G. Battista Ughetti, Director of
the Institute of General Pa­thology at the University of Catania, died August
20, 1931. All the various Ita­lian and foreign newspapers and scientific
journals that reported this sad news stressed the great intellectual importance
of this scholar...After qualifying as a doctor of medicine and surgery, he
worked at various hospitals in Naples, Rome, Paris and Basel. This outstanding
teacher, a perfect example of Italian medical genius, was always a dogged
opponent of vivisection. Prof. Ughetti always gave clinical observation
preference over experimentation, and took every oppor­tunity to sling darts at
the vivisectors. We have him to thank for the discovery of the meningococcus in
necroscopy (the examination of a corpse), and he did not consider it necessary
to inject this into animals in order to study it. He also found it unnecessary
to produa serums, which - as Dr. Ciaburri correctly states – ‘are an
inexhaustible source for the manufacturers, but less beneficial to the health
and the... purse of the sick.’

“Prof. Ughetti was a true genius. This is shown by his
numerous scientific works; such as the excellent essay on fever, which was
translated into German, Russian, English and Spanish, his many publications on
pathogenesis (the origin and development) of hysterical fever, on the pathology
of the liver and many, many other subjects. When Dr. Ciaburri founded the
‘Italian Anti-vivisection Union’ in Italy Prof. Ughetti was one of the first to
join.” (Der Vivisektionsgegner, No. 3, September 1932)

Dr. Francis Donovan, dentist to the Royal Family,
England:

"’It is at best a capricious project, and it is
extremely improbable that it is of any value.’

“This is the firm opinion of Francis D. Donovan, with
regard to the prize of­fered by the International Dental Federation, Paris,
under which experiments on dogs' teeth are prescribed.

This dentist further commented. "I am quite sure
that no British dentist will participate in this prize competition, for we all
consider it to be totally point­less. Very little prospect exists of anything
good coming out of it. What is the point of deliberately infecting the teeth of
dogs with the germs of human dis­eases, when there are so many people with bad
teeth who can be studied by the dentists? I am of the opinion - and I think it
is also shared by my English col­leagues - that nothing can be gained by
dentists creating the same conditions in dogs which actually already exist in
many of their patients." (The Daily Mirror, London, 12 August 1932)

Dr. G.N.W. Thomas: "...There is a superabundance
of mutilations of the human body available

in our hospitals; there are more and more of them as a
result of motor traffic. Such clinical material is also much more reliable for
observation purposes than that obtained through the arbitraty maiming of
animals, with the animals some­times being kept alive in their suffering for
months on end." (Western Mail and South Wales News, 28 July 1932)

"We do not venture to say that guinea-pigs are
better or worse than people; but they are different, so different indeed, that
had not the experiments been conducted under the auspices of the National
Institute for Medical Research, we should have been inclined to describe them
as futile, if not silly." ("The Effects of Alcohol", The
Morning Post, July 9, 1932)

From an editorial in Medical Times, March 1932:

“The teachings of vivisection are often fallacious and
act disastrously on the intelligence of those who trust them. Clinical medicine
is still based on the sure foundation of the teaching of Hippocrates, the
Father of Medicine, who flourished some 2.500 years ago. Strange that we should
have to go so far back for the Golden Age of Medicine! Hippocrates knew nothing
of vivisection, but based his teachings on logical induction and deduction
applied to the observa­tion of health and disease. Although he had not even the
advantage of post-mor­tern examinations - so great was the respect of the
Greeks for the human body - his teaching will last as long as the world
endures.

“The modem fruit of such intellectual decadence is
visible today. Misled by experiments of incredible cruelty on highly organised
animals, soap was de­nounced as a cause of cancer, whereas it is absolutely
certain that it is, on the contrary, not only a safeguard, but in some cases a
cure. Cancer research has done much to obscure the problems of cancer and to
obstruct its cure. a thesis which the present writer is much more ready to
expound than his opponents to dispute.

“How then is the good surgeon formed? It has been most
sensibly explained, among others, by Abel Desjardin, chief surgeon at France's
most prestigious seat of surgical teaching, the College of Surgery of the
Faculty of Paris. Here a summary of his speech at the Congress Against
Vivisection, Geneva, on March 19, 1932:

“‘The basis of surgery is anatomy. That's why surgery
must first be learned from anatomical treatises and atlases, and then by
dissecting a very great num­ber of cadavers. Thus you not only learn the
anatomy, but also acquire indis­pensable manual dexterity. From there you go on
to learn the practice of surgery. This can only be acquired in the hospital and
through daily contact with the pa­tients. You must have been an assistant
before becoming a surgeon...At the end let's examine how one comes to the
actual surgical operation. First you watch, then you assist a surgeon. You do
this a great many times. After you have under­stood the various phases of an
operation and the difficulties that may arise, and have learned how to overcome
them, then, and only then, may you begin to operate. First, easy cases, under
the supervision of an experienced surgeon, who can warn you of any wrong step
or advise you if you have any doubts on how to proceed...This is the real
school of surgery, and I proclaim that there is no other... After I have
explained to you the real school of surgery, it is easy to un­derstand why all
the courses of surgery based on operations on dogs have been miserable
failures. The surgeon who knows his art can learn nothing from those courses,
and the beginner doesn't learn from them the true surgical technique, but
becomes a dangerous surgeon... Furthermore, vivisection corrupts the char­acter,
because it teaches you to attach no importance to the pain you inflict.

“‘That vivisection, being inhuman, has a dehumanizing
effect on those who practice or even just stand by it, is self-evident,
inescapable. In its March 1932 issue, Medical Times stated: "The
moral damage caused by vivisection isn't only general but individual. What is
the inevitable effect on the medical students' morals? It isn't difficult to
provide examples showing that vivisection causes the vivisectors' moral sense
to degenerate.’"

Dr. Michael Berchmans Shipsey writes in the Medical
Times, March 1932: "We now laugh at the Babylonians of 3,000 odd years
ago who looked upon' spirits' as the cause of illness. Without a doubt the
inhabitants of 1,000 years hence will also laugh at us for thinking germs to be
the cause of disease."

Dr. Estcourt-Oswald (Speech at a public meeting in
London, January 21, 1932):

"As far as the idea is concerned that surgeons
have animal experiments to thank for their training, this is totally false. I
believe that ninety per cent of all surgeons have never carried out an
operation on an animal in their life. It's natu­ral that the people become
anxious. They believe that if vivisection were abol­ished it would also be the
end of the doctor's skills. That is not the case at all. The people
additionally say that the medical students must see vivisection ex­periments.
This, too, is false. London University, which awards a very highly­ respected
medical degree, one which I possess myself, in no way demands of its students
that they attend animal experiments.

“We do not achieve health by locking up some wretched
rats in a cage. It is foolish to imagine such a thing, for after all it is easy
enough to make an animal sick. The difficulty is in healing a human being of an
illness which one has not given to him..." (Antivivisection and
Humanitarian Review, London, Jan. - March 1932, p. 21)

The English journal Medical Officer of March 5,
1932 wrote: "There are numerous and potentially terrible risks lurking
behind the mod­em methods of treatment, especially through vaccines, serums and
other biol­ogical products. Some of them lie in the very nature of these
methods, and can­not be avoided."

Prof. Dr. A. Jacquet, Professor of Pharmacology at
Basel University, caused considerable embarrassment in academic circles when he
told his stu­dents in his farewell speech:

"Ladies and Gentlemen! Allow me to use this final
hour of my teaching career to look back...I have often found it embarrassing to
have to present to students as facts on which therapeutic treatment can be
based, material which is teeming with uncertain-ties, with suppositions, with dubious
experience, yes, even with superstition. The material from which we create the
substance of a lecture is provided to us primarily through the results of
experimental pharma­cology and of experimental therapy...As far as the first
source is concerned, one must be aware of the fact that the pharmacological
experiment is a brutal oper­ation. The animal is administered poison until such
time as objectively percep­tible functional disturbances set in. The delicate
balance of mutually interacting functions is relentlessly interfered with, and
insufficient account taken of the fact that the new pharmacology is basically
nothing other than animal toxico­logy. Healthy animals are poisoned and made
ill. That is something entirely dif­ferent from influencing a changed function
within a sick human being by ad­ministering a medicament I have always objected
to the brutality of these oper­ations... he young doctors enter into practice
without sufficient preparation, and accordingly fall all the easier victims to
the pharmaceutical advertising. The manufacturers' brochures become their
therapeutical advisers..." (Schweizerische Medizinische Wochenschrift. 1932,
No. 22, p. 513) (Only one criticism can be made of this statement: it's a pity
that Prof. Jac­quet made it in the final hour of his teaching career, and not
in the first hour).

Dr. med. With. Metzger, Stuttgart: "...As a
doctor and as a human being I am prepared to say: We have per­haps a right also
to demand sacrifice from an animal, particularly if we are pre­pared to be
sacrificed ourselves. But we have no right at all to commit cruelty. But
vivisection will always be cruel. Works of erudition can never justify the
frightful suffering to which the animal world is being subjected with
increasing frequency by vivisection..." (Tierrecht und Tierschutz. No.
10, 1932)

William Howard Hay, M.D. (1932):

"Herewith is my opinion of vivisection, and as
many times as I have openly challenged the friends of this practice to show any
useful results, just so many times have I met with no constructive evidence of
its utility.

"My own familiarity with the practice during my
preparation for medicine convinced me that these experiments are undertaken in
medical schools mere­ ly to make an impressive course, not to prove anything,
for each experiment was merely a demonstration of things already well known, as
a rule.

"Thus, useless experiments embodying the greatest
cruelty, were repeated before class after class, ad infinitum and ad nauseam,
till their cruelties became so revolting to many members of the classes that
some stayed away, rather than witness them.

"I know of nothing that has ever been developed
through vivisection that could not much better be proved in other and less
cruel ways, and verily believe that there is now apparent a realization of both
the cruelties and the uselessness of the practice that will never end till it
is made a felony to cut alive any animal with knives, burn it or roast it to
death, smother it, starve it, or in any way mal­treat it in the name of
science...I will do all in my power to assist in any way their efforts to lay
before the public the now well concealed and misrepresented facts of the
vivisection laboratories."

Prof. Nigro Lico of Italy published in 1932 a book
entitled The Fallacy of Experimentation on Animals. In the introduction
he wrote:

"Much literature of this nature comes from those
countries where there are many people, both scientists and laymen, who are
bringing to the notice of the public the dangerous aberrations of medical
science. Their arguments are of the utmost importance and merit serious,
disinterested attention, divested of pre­vious conceptions, because this matter
concerns not only the painful problem of vivisection itself and its intense
torture of animals, but it has resulted in filling the science of medicine with
theories and systems which are having tragic

consequence upon the health of mankind."

Dr. med. Olga Lautreppe (Paris):

"Vivisection is based on two false notions. One
is that the experimental method - so successful when applied to inanimate
bodies - should also be applied to living bodies. But the great Cuvier, the
glory of France and of science, totally rejects the application of the
experimental method to the science of life processes (physiology) and disputes
the justification for vivisection, saying: 'All the parts of a living body are
linked with one another, they only function cor­rectly when they are acting
together. To separate one organ from the whole means putting it into the class
of inanimate matter; this means totally altering its nature.'

“The second false idea is that we can draw conclusions
from experiments on animals in relation to human beings, because animals have a
certain similarity to humans. In fact, however, there are more dissimilarities
than similarities be­tween human beings and animals."

"Any person who had to endure certain experiments
carried out on animals which perish slowly in the laboratories would regard
death by burning at the stake as a happy deliverance. Like everyone else in my
profession, I used to be of the opinion that we owe nearly all our knowledge of
medical and surgical science to animal experiments. Today I know that precisely
the opposite is the case, in surgery especially, they are of no help to the
practitioner, indeed he is often led astray by them."

In his preface to a book called Cancer: The Surgeon
and the Researcher, by Mr. Ellis Barker, Sir Arbutbnot Lane wrote in the Sunday
Express of De­cember 27,1931:

"Perhaps no disease compels the attention of the
lay public more than cancer, yet no progress is being made in affecting an
incidence which is increas­ing rapidly in a community already fairly saturated
with this disease...In Eng­land, as elsewhere, vast sums of money are expended
in obtaining radium and in developing other means for controlling and perhaps
curing cancer. The re­sult, however, shows that the published mortality
increases with a startling rapidity in spite of this vast outlay of public money.
To show how little use Medical Research has been in this direction one need
only call attention to the fact that, within the last three years , an
important research body, confirmed by eminent medical opinion, stated that food
has nothing to do with cancer, that cancer came like a bolt from the blue. The
unfortunate factor in all professions is that in proportion as one develops a
special sense, one loses one's common sense. It is now dawning upon the
profession that, while the use of drugs and operations is essential in the
treatment of disease, it is the pre-eminent duty of the profession to study
Health, to observe its reaction to diet and to educate the public in the simple
laws of Health. Prevention is the duty of the Medical Pr0­fession and its study
has unfortunately been hopelessly neglected...That all the diseases of
civilisation, from pyorrhoea to cancer, are due to errors in diet, is
absolutely certain."

Dr. med. R. Guenin, Geneva: "I testify before God
and my conscience that vivisection is an ungodly atro­city. Its scientific
value is meaningless, it cannot be used in practice and is sim­ply useless to
humans.People who carry it out are
either sadists, torturers or bloodthirsty beings,

mostly depraved souls, badly adjusted
and so on. In the hospitals a great role is also played by the compulsion just
to do some­thing, the need to occupy one's time." (Geneva, 12 December
1931)

"I beg forgiveness if I dare describe myself so
presumptuously. But this is not a judgement on my merit, but simply a
submission of titles that is absolute­ly necessary in the face of the
impatience with which, where vivisection is con­cerned, anyone is rejected who
has not had a dissecting knife in his hand or sat in the Holy Temples of
Science.

“My credentials are really all there: degree in
medicine and surgery, prac­tice in scientific institutes and hospitals, almost
thirty years' practice in the medical profession, and - what a coincidence! -
especially in laboratories and in that biology which is one of the chosen
fields for vivisection. Therefore, not only ‘expert’, but - please excuse me
once more – ‘very ex­pert’!

“Well now, despite this expertise I cannot help but
associate myself unhesi­tatingly with the ranks of ‘inexpert’
anti-vivisectionists by placing the result of my studies and experience at
their service. What are in fact the results? First and foremost, the
confirmation of the un­believable, unimaginable horror of vivisection.

“I have already had occasion to confirm - and I repeat
it, without fear of being contradicted - that everything that can be thought
out by a sadistic and criminal imagination with regard to cruelty and
mistreatment has in fact been carried out and exceeded. I have also already
said that the ‘non-experts’, whether they are anti-vivisectionists or not,
cannot ever form a picture of the whole tragic reality of vivisection, even if
they have heard or read about it or formed their own ideas about it. This
reality is so appalling that if it could be shown to interested and
uninterested persons outside the Holy Temples of Science, this alone would be
sufficient to bring victory for the fight against vi­visection.

“Secondly, emphasis must be put on the uselessness of
vivisection, as well as on the cruelty that it involves...It is certain that in
my thirty years of practice in laboratories and hospi­tals I have not had the
consolation of even once seeing a single animal chloro­formed for the
experiment. And every time that I drew the attention of the others to this
question I found myself faced with the most complete and genuine astonishment,
as if that were something that they had never thought about and that was
inconceivable, or I was given the categorical explanation that it was not worth
the effort of bothering about such pointless matters. Also taken into
consideration at the same time was the rightful anger of the laboratory attend­ant,
for whose dinner table the slaughtered animals were destined as a gift.

“It is painful, very painful even - but it is totally
true - that one must say: no chloroform, but pushing, pulling, lashings and
cursings, and, on top of that, total indifference and mocking smiles, and this
- I say this, because I have myself seen it - from the University Senator
Professor to the assistant, the student, the laboratory attendant. The latter,
with his less educated mind, follows the example he has learned from his superiors,
and thus becomes the absolute slave-­driver and torturer of the animals
entrusted to him, both before and after the ex­periment.

“That is the evidence that I can and must submit, as
an ‘expert’, about the mysteries of vivisection."

---------

“Dr. Horatio Matthews, M.D., Ch.B. said: ‘Our
difficulty is to awaken the public to the facts, for the medical profession
hides its head in every possible way. It hides this practice in dark, unsavoury
rooms. Its instruments are a dis­grace to any medical man, its laboratories and
operating theatres are disgusting and revolting.’ (In response to interruption
by medical students Dr. Matthews added, amidst laughter and applause: ‘If I
were marking your examination papers I would fail every one of you, and there
are a lot more on the Medical Council I would fail.’)

“’The British Medical Association, Ltd., sets up the
ethical law which gov­erns the medical profession. Its recommendations are
passed on to the Medical Council, and invariably adopted by that Council, and,
in addition to that, it is fairly evident that the British Medical Association
employs agents as "agents provocateurs" to trip up reformers. A
doctor was struck off the register within the last fortnight for having broken
"ethical" medical rules. Lord Knutsford, a layman, is allowed to
write in the columns of the British Medical Journal on vi­visection,
whilst I, a doctor of 25 years' standing, am refused.

“’I would ask you to do your part in ventilating these
facts, and you can help me to ventilate it to the profession by cutting my page
out of the Abolitionist and circulating it widely amongst the
profession.’” (Applause.) (Abolitionist, Aug. 1, 1931)

Major Reginald Austin, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., after
referring to "the very common fallacy that there are two sides to every
question", added:

“All of us are brought up on certain tenets, we have
to be taught a belief in certain practice before we can pass our examinations.
It was many years before I arrived at the knowledge of the points I am going to
bring forward. One of the most mislead­ing things we are taught is the
knowledge concerning the question of vaccina­tion, and I am going to deal with
that subject pretty deeply, because it is the first point which made me become
an anti-vivisectionist.

“In the year 1894 I was sent out to India full of the
wonderful theories as to what vaccination would do for one. I was sent to
Hyderabad, Sind, a hotbed of smallpox. The troops were over a mile away from
the town. So obsessed were we with the value of vaccination to prevent
smallpox, that the Medical Officer of the district insisted on our having
frequent parades.

“My enthusiasm for vaccination, however, diminished at
a time because three of the native followers who had been vaccinated contracted
smallpox three months afterwards. I was talking to one of the native
sub-assistant surgeons and he told me it was quite a common experience in this
country.

“During the last war I was Commanding Medical Officer
stationed at Cal­cutta, and during that time I had five cases of enteric fever
diagnosed by vari­ous medical officers in the hospital, and I put them down in
my hospital record as enteric fever. The Chief Medical Officer of the district
looked at my books and said: ‘I see you have five cases of enteric fever, but this
should not be, as they have been inoculated.’ I had to ‘cook’ my books and
change the name of the disease for fear of upsetting the general belief in
inoculation.

“The relation between vaccination and vivisection is
this, that whereas lymph used for vaccination against smallpox used to be taken
from a cow suffering from cowpox, healthy animals are now deliberately
inoculated with virus and given diseases in order to provide vaccines and
serums for human beings. (In­terruption and applause.)

“The Chairman, after inviting questions which were not
forthcoming, declared the meeting closed, after it had been unanimously agreed
to send a tele­gram of sympathy to Dr. WaIter R. Hadwen in his illness. (Abolitionist,
Aug. 1, 1931)

Again and again, leading medical men have pointed out
the futility of vivi­section for studying the brain of man, but to no avail.
Dr. Bemard Hollander wrote in the English magazine Medical Press as far
back as 1931 (May 20, p. 411):

"Sixty years ago it was confidently
anticipated that experiments on the ex­posed brains of living animals would
speedily disclose the inner working of the brain and make mental disorders
disappear forever. These extravagant hopes have not been fulfilled. It was
fantastic to expect a solution of the working of the human brain, or to get any
light thrown on the origin of mental disorders, from the stimulation or
destruction of bits of the cerebral tissues of monkeys, dogs or cats."

Dr. med. Eckbard, Hanover:

"I have been an opponent of vivisection ever
since my student days, when I witnessed this terrible cruelty toanimals
which I had to look at with the ut­most revulsion, without being able to
prevent it. The pictures of vivisection I saw then, which still appear
before my mind's eye, have so far lost nothing of their dreadfullness for me...

“Today's orthodox medicine has, on the basis of a
vivisection-oriented method of treatment and as a result of the disastrous
effects of big capitalistic influences, led medical science onto totally false
paths; it has established the purely materialistic, soulless therapeutic
treatment for which the human being is seen merely as a product of chemistry
and physics, in which everything is only measured and weighed..." (from
his speech in Locarno, 4 May 1931)

Dr. med. Steintel, Berlin:

"It's not one-sided causes that we have to champion
here; opponents of vac­cination and anti-vivisectionists must work hand in
hand. The planned diphthe­ria law will have really disastrous consequences! All
schoolchildren are tobe vaccinated three times per year. By multiplying
the number of schoolchildren by three or nine injections per year,
anyone can himself calculate the dividends that this flood of vaccinations must
yield!

“The fear of the bacillus serves as a pathway tointimidation.
In what direc­tion are we going? Goodness and wholesomeness have always
triumphed, the world will get better, it must get better! The medical political
edifice will un­doubtedly topple, many doctors will have to take thought
within themselves and humbly resign. We need doctors who preserve health."
(Extract from a speech held in Locarno, May 3,1931)

Dr. med. Huber, Uetendorf: "I hate any cruelty to
animals. I condemn vivisection, under which name I mainly refer to bloody
experiments. I have been opposed to them since my student days..."
(Uetendorf, 28 March 1931)

"The size of the animal was found to be no
criterion of its ability to survive. With the toxin at a lethal concentration
dogs died before cats, rabbits earlier than rats, and all those expired before
goats and monkeys. It is difficult to understand why there should be this
difference in the time factor." (Article on "Poisoning by Hydrocyanic
Gas" in TheLancet, Feb. 14, 1931, p. 362)

Dr. Bachmann, Medical Officer of Health (Article in Die
Reinheit, No. 1/2,1931): "The cruelties to animals, vivisection,
carried out in the name of Science, are morally indefensible atrocities which
are incompatible with a true spiritual culture. "

Biagio Miraglio, Professor at the Hospital for the
Mentally Sick at the University of Naples, a famous phrenologist, was a zealous
campaigner against vivisection. He also held various conferences about
vivisection in Naples, at which he confronted this difficult question very
courageously and candidly. At one of these meetings, on September 3, 1882, he
spoke as follows:

"Vivisection is not only useless as a method of
research, but, still worse, it is a dishonest and false method. I have already
indicated several reasons for this at another conference. Vivisection has added
absolutely nothing new to what we already knew or what we had already achieved
through other positive re­search. On the contrary, it has diverted the
observing intellect away from the right path, so that the young people,
satisfied with those seemingly brilliant re­sults, have neglected clinical work
and pathological anatomy, the study of which must go hand in hand with that
inductive philosophy which teaches that, if any result conflicts with logic,
with certain laws which one cannot dispute and with morality, that experiment
is either false or to be looked upon unfavourably..." (From L'idea
zoofila e zootecnica, No. 1,1931)

Prof. Dr.Nelaton, famous French surgeon, wrote
to Claude Bemard, the well-known vivisector: "...that every system based
on experimental physiology is false, and that a big book could be written about
the physiologists' contradictions of one an­other."

From a speech by Dr. P. Pijl,physician,
President of the "Anti-Vivisection Association", The Hague, Holland:

"In order to be healthy and avoid illness, we
must live hygienically, that is live simply and naturally, and for this purpose
one does not need a single school that works with a laborious system of
medicine geared to vivisection; all that is needed, besides a suitable diet
based on plants and minerals, is the simple use of sun, light, air, rational
clothing and so on, and last but not least: proper hous­ing and a good mental
balance. And this still holds true if the body becomes ill, in which case the
non-vivisectionist art of healing to be discussed later may possibly play a
part.

“Trespassing against the cosmic laws produces illness;
and this trespass becomes all the more negatively woven into the lot of mankind
the more man­kind kicks against these laws, as we have explained here, which is
what the vi­visection-based system of medicine - among others - does, which
violates the cosmic laws in violating life.

“The vivisectionist allopathy, by contrast, dreadfully
increases mankind's debit balance. One only needs to think of the fact that at
present some 3,000,000 animals fall victim to it every year, not to mention the
thousands of vivisections carried out on people.

“With a system of medicine that bases itself on
vivisection experiments, we ever more reduce our knowledge of the nature of
illnesses and impede healing.

“Cuvier said: one must not force Nature's secrets from
her; one must observe Nature, then one learns everything. The allopathic school
(of medicine), on the contrary, does nothing but constantly snatch Nature's
secrets from her in the most cruel and cunning manner, it thereby corrupts the
students, causes the doc­tor to enjoy no confidence any more among the people,
brings the profession into disrepute among the public and prepares the way for
vivisection on humans, which is what one can arrive at through only one short
step from vivisection on animals, which under the practice of this school is a
senseless reflex action."

------------

Dr. F. Bachmann, senior medical officer,
Berlin-Charlottenburg: "We reformers, however, have for a long while
favoured medical instruc­tion which rejects every animal experiment as
scientifically unnecessary, indeed misleading, as depraving and nothing short
of criminal, and we also champion the construction of vivisection-free
hospitals." (From a letter protesting against the Tomarkin Institute in
Locarno, 1931)

Dr. Emit Schmid, physician, Etzgen: "In
agreement. What is your view about the creation of a Swiss association of
anti-vivisectionist doctors? - That will come." (Palm Sunday, 1931.)

"It has long been recognized, by those who have
had most experience in the propagation of tumours by cell-grafting, that the
whole process is absolutely ar­tificial and has no counterpart in the natural
genesis of a tumour." (Dr. W.E. Gye, The Cause of Cancer, London,
1931, p. 22)

In 1931, an article in the Paris daily, Le Matin, reported:
"Once more the census proves that France's decreasing population is not
due to any decline in births but to increased death rate... The increasing
death rate is greatest among infants, the very class that is being subjected to
wholesale 'protective' vaccina­tion."

Dr. Med. S. Besshard, Cham: "An animal is not a
human being, by a long chalk. But people are often beasts, including the most
famous professors of physiology. That's for sure." (1931)

Excerpt from the article "Why I Object to Vivisection"
in the Animal's Friend of December, 1930, by the well-known English
surgeon, M. Beddow Bayly, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.:

“Vivisection appeals to the basest instincts of fear
and cowardice, and ex­cuses any cruelty on the plea of utility to man's material
welfare. Before the bar of Human Justice vivisection stands condemned on three
main counts: cruelty to animals, uselessness to man, and obstruction on the
path of real knowledge.

“1) The painful nature of vivisection is admitted by
many leading vivisec­tors, is the shameless boast of not a few, and is proved
by the offical records of the experiments performed. The Cruelty to Animals Act
of 1876 now contains a "pain" clause, which expressly permits an
animal to be kept alive in severe pain if not prolonged, or in prolonged
moderate pain until the main object of the experiment has been achieved; after
this the animal may be kept in moderate pain if not prolonged, the sole judge
in each case, both of its severity and likeli­hood of persistence, being the person
most interested in the experiment, the vi­visector himself.

“Recent painful experiments, performed within the last
twelve years, in­clude:

“a) Injection of boiling water into the pancreatic
artery of a dog until it be­came unconscious through the pain. (1)

“b) Production of intestinal obstruction in dogs by
tying off the intestinal canal with tape at various points from the stomach
downwards. No food or water given for forty-eight hours before the operation,
nor until they died. (2)

“c) Water in excessive amounts pumped into the
stomachs of dogs and cats until vomiting, convulsions, and death occurred. (3)

“f) Closing the anal canal of pregnant bitches with
purse-string sutures, so as to prevent the passage of anything from the bowel,
while feeding continued, the animals lingering as long as eleven days before
dying or being killed. (5)

“g) Investigation of "question whether pain and
trauma can produce shock in experimental animals", in the course of which
sensitive organs were crushed and sciatic nerve stimulated at two-minute
intervals for one and a half hours until "central nervous system shock
supervened". Some of the dogs used were only given morphia, a drug which
stimulated the sensitivity to pain in these ani­mals instead of dulling it. (6)

“h) Experiments in starvation in deprivation of water
(7) in running to death in motor-driven revolving cages, (8) in exposure to
high temperatures, (9) to poison gases and various infections, (10) and in the
injection of poisons and disease pro­ducts which result in a painful and
lingering death - these are becoming so numerous and varied that one is left
wondering if ingenuity could devise any new method of inflicting torture, until
the perusal of a fresh report from a re­search laboratory shows anew to what
base ends the imagination of man may be prostituted.

“2) That the knowledge so gained is useless is proved
daily by the failure of medical science to make headway in the control of
disease. This is especially noticeable in those diseases, such as cancer and
diabetes, etc., in which the grea­test number of painful experiments have been
performed.

“Remedies from time to time are hailed as triumphs of
scientific research, but experience discredits them, and they pass into
oblivion, while the death-rate from the disease all too frequently continues to
rise.

“3) Vivisection is a hindrance not only by reason of
diverting research from profitable channels, but because of the degrading
effect it has upon the charac­ter of those who perform or sanction it. How can
it be possible for a medical training which inures the student to witnessing
acts of atrocity on the defence­less, and leads him to laugh in derision at the
bare mention of such words as "pity", "compassion", or
"motherhood", to produce a type of mind and heart ca­pable of
fathoming those deep causes of ill-health which lie within man him­self?”

References:

1 American Journal of Physiology, March, 1924

2 Journal of Experimental Medicine, vol.
XLVIII, 1928

3 Lancet, October 13, 1923, p. 838

4 American Journal of Physiology, January, 1927

5 Lancet, May 24, 1930, p. 1115

6 American Journal of Physiology, June, 1918,
p. 314

7 Medical Press, November 28, 1928

8 American Journal of Physiology, September,
1927

9 Archives of Pathology, vol. VIII, No. 4,
October, 1929

10 Continually performed at present day at the
experimental station, Por­ton, England.

Note. All the foregoing experiments were performed in
British or American laboratories.

CIVIS comment: More than half a century after Bayly
wrote this article, the two maladies for which the greatest number of animals
have been sacrificed, cancer and diabetes, have continued their rise. Diabetes,
which was one of the rarest maladies at the beginning of the century, began to
rise sharply after Bant­ing and Best introduced insulin and is now the third
cause of death in the USA, cancer being the second. (Cardiovascular diseases,
another favorite playground of the animal researchers, is first)

-----------------

Dr. Fielding-Gould (1930): "We cannot find any
justification for the continued use of cats and dogs in research."

Sir Berkeley George Moynihan, M.D., K.C.M.G.:
President, Royal College of Surgeons: (The Journal of the American Medi­cal
Association) 1930.

"Lord Moynihan's criticism of physiologists, in
his recent address at the opening of the Banting Institute in Toronto, has
started a controversy. He com­plained that physiologists were neglecting
research on man ('hominal research') and were concerned too much with research
on animals; that their aloofness from medicine was increasing year by year, and
that their discoveries were be­coming of less use to the clinicians...As to
surgery, he pointed out that the ad­vances in knowledge of gastric and duodenal
ulcer and cholelithiasis had been made by surgeons with little help from the
laboratory. Indeed, the contribution of the laboratory to the surgery of the
stomach was not only almost negligible but was potentially dangerous, because
so divergent from human experience...

"Hominal physiology, indeed, has awakened or
sustained an interest in few physiologists, whether at home or abroad. It is
true that they have been busy in the practice of animal research, but not
seldom their labour has seemed aloof from human problems, and the results
incapable of application to the maladies of men."

Lord Moynihan wrote in TheLancet on 11
Oct 1930: "The material of the human body is neither the same nor subject
to the same influences as that of animals nearest to man; similar functions are
not wholly discharged by precisely similar mechanisms...Other reservations are
also necessary in respect of the validity of animal experiments. The changes
pro­duced in experiments upon normal animals are relatively gross; the changes
pro­duced by disease in man are minimal, and of so fine a texture that we
cannot properly compare them with these coarser induced conditions."

Prof. Henry J. Bigelow, MD, LLD, late Prof. of
Surgery, Harvard Univer­sity: "The grounds for public supervision, is that
vivisection immeasurably, be­yond any other pursuit, involves the infliction of
torture to little or no purpose. The law should interfere. There can be no
doubt that in this relation there exists a case of cruelty to animals far
transcending in its refinement and in its horror anything that has been known
in the history of nations. There will come a time when the world will look back
to modem vivisection in the name of science as they do now to burning at the
stake in the name of religion."

"We anti -vivisectionist doctors oppose the abuse
of pure research, the scien­tific animal torture, and we demand its banning
under criminal law. We demand its total abolition and would also demand this
even if - which is not the case ­some great use for suffering mankind were to
emerge from it. Apart from the depraving cruelties and the impossibility of
carrying out most experiments with­out causing pain, experimentation on the
weak body, i.e. the torture of the de­fenceless animal, is unreliable and
misleading in its results on the part of ambi­tious pushers and illusionists
with no moral scruples.

“...But we do not content ourselves with
condemning animal experiments from the standpoint of sympathy, moral laws and
religion; we wage our fight against animal torture also from the purely
scientific standpoint, and can prove that it is superfluous, useless, harmful
and disastrous for our race. " (From Der Arzt. August 1930, No. 8,
special issue)

“The serum treatment against cattle disease, carried
out by the authorities in South-West Africa, destroyed the herds belonging to
the Herero tribe, drove them to desperation and rebellion and cost the German
Empire much money and blood. The preventative injection against whooping cough,
measles and scarlet fever urged by the serum producers does not in a single
case meet with the undivided approval of the orthodox medical world.

“Illnesses created artificially in healthy animals
cannot be compared with the maladies which occur spontaneously in human beings
burdened with foreign matter. The outstanding researcher and M. D. Professor
Hans Much of Ham­burg cannot draw enough attention to the basic error of a
system of medicine which claims to be precise but in truth, in its practice of
animal experimenta­tion, inevitably commits the grossest inexactitudes (see Much:
Hippokrates der Grosse, 1926, and Das Wesen der Heilkunst, 1928),
Looked at under this light, the whole of serum therapy is a scientific
aberration. All the inoculating and in­jecting is wicked blood-sucking, it
damages our people, only serves the inter­ests of the big
chemical-pharmaceutical capitalists and the serum producers...

“The statement as to the indispensability of animal
experiments is untenable in the face of these facts. There are not only
grounds, there is a duty, to subject vivisection, carried out as it is with
such inhuman cruelty, to a searching exam­ination. It should be emphasised
again here that the supporters of animal experi­ments constantly talk of their
successes (extremely dubious successes, as has been shown), but no word is uttered
about the failures which far exceed the suc­cesses in number, whereas they
would have to be included in any serious and honest examination. There is no
doubt that more people have been killed by vi­visection than have been saved by
it... " (From the report for a petition to the Criminal Law Committee of
the Ger­man Parliament, August 1930)

----------

In the Abolitionist of Aug. 1, 1930: (CIVIS:
This article is as true today as it was when it was written)

‘The President Waiter Hadwen, M.D., in introducing Mr.
Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, referred to the fact that his indignation at the
support given by his University to vivisection had led him to throw up his M.A.
degree. (Ap­plause.)

‘Mr. Alasdair Alpin Macgregor said:

“I am glad that some very slight ref­erence has been
made to this University business, because I consider that the Universities
throughout the so-called civilized world are the ringleaders in this matter. If
it be true that medical research cannot progress without experiments upon
defenceless animals, as they tell us in Universities, then Universities have
outlived their usefulness. (Applause.)

“I have challenged any vivisecting professor to debate
with me the moral is­ sues involved. They have not come forward.

“What have they done instead? They have gone round the
country incensing students against this movement They go to meetings and kick
up a noise like a lot of infants when you give them the chance of a public
debate, and when it comes to question-time they fallout. Anyone who supports
the practice of vi­visection is a coward, and anyone who is involved in
vivisection is a bully, be­cause as I have said, you are inflicting upon a
creature which is powerless in your hand something that you would not have
inflicted upon yourself. The great progress made in medicine and surgery has
emanated from the sacrifices of men and women who have gone through it
themselves. There is no doubt about that The evidence of vivisectors, the
evidence before the Royal Commission, the re­ports we read in pseudo-scientific
journals like the British Medical Journal show us that they themselves
have been, and are likely to remain, at sixes and sevens on the fundamentals.
They are not agreed upon a single important fact. They have doped the public
for centuries with black magic and superstition. If it be true that the results
that have emanated from vivisection have been beneficial to the human species,
how is it that disease is on the increase? You cannot give us one example where
scientific benefit has been derived from experimentation upon animals. It is
absolutely unsound scientifically.

“Until you realize that vivisection is a vested
interest you will never under­stand what it means. It is one of the
best-entrenched interests in this country. If you have tried to do any
propagandist work on this subject you will know that. Here is one public aspect
that occurs to me. The British Broadcasting Corpor­ation, under the
jurisdiction of one department of the State, the Post Office, will not allow
anti-vivisectors to give their views on this matter. A great deal of un­intelligible
nonsense about the germ theory has already gone through the other.

“Take another department of the State - the War
Office. We are alleged to have signed a Protocol abolishing gas warfare; and
yet every year we are spending tens of thousands of pounds of public money in
trying different poison gases upon defenceless animals in this country. If we
are sincere about our Protocol, as any man who was in the war (as I was,
unfortunately) ought to be, why is it that even this Government - and I am a
Socialist - is following the example of its predecessors and allowing these
abominable experiments to go on living animals?

“Vivisectionists tell us that vivisection is on behalf
of the human race. How in the name of God can gas warfare be in the interests
of the human race? Yet there are animals now in their hundreds upon which this
filthy devilry is being tried. It is bad enough that men should be murdering
one another, but to me it is a thousand times worse that they should be
preparing a means of organised murder upon something more defenceless than
themselves. That is the War Of­fice. Something will have to be done about that,
and quite soon.

“Then we come to another department of the Government
called the Minis­try of Health, a Ministry that I think, upon its own showing,
is more deserving of the title of the Ministry of Ill-Health. The Ministry of
Health, with public money, is now going on with these disgusting experiments on
animals - tying the ducts of dogs and cramming them with linseed, and arguing
from this to the human species. Even a schoolboy could tell you that you cannot
argue from the intestine of a dog to the intestine of a human being. Scientifically
it is absolute­ly unsound, as they themselves have proved.”

From Dr. W. Hadwen's speech on June 12, 1930 at the
Central Hall, West­minster:

“The practice is unscientific because it is quite
impossible to reason from a lower class of animal to a higher class. You
remember the case of Sir Frederick Treves. He told a large body of medical men
that he went abroad to perfect him­self in abdominal surgery; that he there
performed his experiments; and he had to confess that, instead of helping him,
they had only led him astray. He had, he said, to unlearn everything that he
had learned, and begin over again. When you remember that a great surgeon of the
calibre of Sir Frederick Treves had to ac­knowledge that, it shows how
difficult it is to reason from an animal to a man. You cannot do it. Nothing
whatever has been gained by vivisection that has been of the slightest benefit
in the amelioration or cure of any human disease. (Ap­plause and dissent.)
Moreover, the whole practice is useless. I say nothing has been gained by it,
and furthermore, what is worse than all, it is absolutely cruel.”

Lt. Colonel J. F. Donegan, M.R.C.R.S., M.R.S.M.:
"...I think I am in the position to convince any impartial mind of the
truth of my statement that vivi­section has never been of the slightest benefit
or use to mankind..." (From a speech at a protest meeting against
vivisection at "Friend's House", London; quoted in Antivivisection
and Humanitarian Review, March-April 1930)

Prof. Hastings Gilford, surgeon, in The Lancet, 1930:

"That research into the cause and nature of
cancer is making no headway is obvious to everyone who has followed its drift
since the movement began with the beginning of this century.

"And now, after thirty years of research, all
that it has to show is a prodi­gious heap of facts and inductions got by much
industry from animal sources, but, so far as man is concerned, no better than a
tumor - an innocent tumor ­useless to man, and most decidedly of no use to
mice...Laboratory cancer re­search has gone for so many years, contentedly
grinding out data and spinning inductions without attention being drawn to the
fact that it never produces any useful results. And now, after a quarter of a
century of research, we can see to what a deplorable waste of energy and
ability and money this academic, aim­less toil may lead. One useful, if
negative, induction, however emerges, which is that the problem of the causation
of human cancer is not to be solved by ex­periments on lower animals in
laboratories."

Dr. med. Will, Stralsund (Methoden zur Bekaempfung
der Vivisektion): "I am a convinced and radical opponent of every
experiment on living animals, and am so on the following scientific grounds:
The results gathered through ani­mal experiments have no validity for human
beings, since man's mental and emotional structure - but also his bodily
structure - is organized quite differ­ently from an animal's." (Abstract, Tier
und Mensch, March 1930, No.2)

Dr. Fielding-Gould: "We are opposed to
vivisection because it is idiotic. It is not possible to carry out experiments
on animals that give us reliable infor­mation about the organism and physiology
of the human being. One of the grea­test men from the London Hospital, Sir
Frederick Treves, told me that he had gone to Geneva to carry out vivisection
when he was studying gynaecological surgery. I asked him: "What did you
gain from it?" He replied: "I was misled, I came away knowing less
than before I started." (Speech at a public protest meet­ing against
vivisection at "Friend's House", London, 27 Feb. 1930; reported in Antivivisection
and Humanitarian Review, March-April 1930)

"It is and remains a plain fact that man is just
as subject to the laws of Na­ture as the tiniest worm, however proud he may be
about his seemingly power­ful position in the world. If he transgresses the
laws of Nature, then Nature in­exorably punishes him with disease, infirmity,
death, and not only him but also his offspring into the third and fourth
generations. No one can escape this iron law. What it amounts to here is either
to obey and live, or not to obey and suf­fer and perish for it. One should not
think that Nature allows itself to be traded with, to let us thumb our noses at
it with the medicine bottle and the syringe of serum. Anyone who thinks that
possible has not yet at all understood it and its powerful workings.

“Seen from this basic viewpoint, vivisection
considered as a watchtower can only be described as a ‘conning’ tower, which in
the long run serves no other purpose but to immeasurably increase the profusion
of suffering in the world.”

"The young doctor is made to believe that human
beings in health and dis­ease react in the identical way in which animals used
for experimental purposes are reacting. That mistaken idea has been very
harmful to the art of healing and to the patients themselves. This has been
proved also by Prof. Hans Much, who has criticised this error in detail."
(Dr. Erwin Liek, one of the most eminent Ger­man doctors, Surgeon of Danzig, in
The Doctor's Mission, John Murray, Lon­don, 1930, p: 5. Prof. Hans Much
of Hamburg University, author of a score of medical tomes and the discoverer of
the granules of the tubercular bacillus, is one of this century's most
distinguished medical scientists.)

"... It is only by the study of the effects on
patients that we can hope to un­derstand the effects of radium." (Dr. J.
A. Braxton Hicks, British Empire Cancer Campaign. Seventh Annual Report,
1930, p. 58)

Prof. Dr. Carl Ludwig Schleich, the inventor of local
anaesthesia: "When I had to look at six frogs being beheaded with scissors
at the physiology depart­ment of Prof. Hermann in Zurich... and the
lightning-fast puncturing of the spi­nal cord of some poor, cooing pigeons,
that was the end of my enthusiasm for medicine. I was seized with anger, and
determined to say farewell to it forever. It seemed impossible to me to
participate in this senseless cruelty. I wanted to be a doctor to the suffering
on humane grounds, and I stood, disgusted, before a place of learning, before a
cult of the most frightful indifference to suffering and death." (Besonnte
Vergangenheit, Lebenserinnerungen, p. 128, Emst Ver­lag, Berlin, 1930)

A. M. Mendenhall, M. D., Head of the Department of
Obstetrics, Indiana University School of Medicine, in an article entitled
‘Solution of Pituitary and Ruptured Uterus’:

"It is a powerful drug even when greatly diluted,
and no method has yet been developed that will positively insure a given
strength. Too much cannot be said in warning those who persist in using this
powerful drug that there is no dependable way of knowing the degree of effect
they may ex­pect from it until they try it out on the patient herself." (Journal
of the Ameri­can Medical Association, Apr. 20,1929, p. 1341)

"As pointed out by Halban, the placenta
stimulates the growth of the geni­tals and the breast glands. While this is
true for animals, it does not hold good for human beings." (J. P.
Greenhill, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gy­necology, Feb. 1929,
p.254)

Dr. Andrew Sergeant McNeil, L.R.S.M, L.R.C.S.: "I
am of the opi­nion that the total abolition of vivisection is a necessity, for
it is useless and misleading, and animals show great differences from one
another, just as people do, and this not only as individuals but as a result of
changing circumstances... If one observes the lack of results from these animal
experimentation methods after a long time, it must be clear to all reasonable
people that another system of research geared to the prevention and treatment
of cancer and many other ill­nesses is urgently necessary... " (From an
article in Anti-Vivisection and Hu­manitarian Review, Dec. 1928, p. 164)

Gennaro Ciaburri, physician, Bologna (The Cruelty
and Futility of Vivi­section): "Vivisection is totally useless, both
for clarifying purely scientific problems, since observation contributes more
to that than does experimentation, as well as for medicine, since man and
animal are not the same." (Italian jour­nal L'idea zoofile e
zootecnica, No. 10, Oct 1927, and Memorial, Jan. 4, 1927)

Dr. Hautekeit (letter to the newspaper Etoile Beige,
July 3,1927): "Every profession contains some conceited incompetents,
our profession more than other ones. But why must it be that thousands of
innocent victims, whose inge­niously thought -out torments the general public
has not the least idea of, should suffer in this way for a so-called scientific
or medical piece of flashy publicity?"

Dr. Herbert Snow, eminent physician at the London
Cancer Hospital: "Due to the powerful control exercised by business
interests, the prospects for the public are all the more gloomy and bad the
more the power of these basi­cally selfish money interests is centered on the
large-scale manufacturing chem­ist. The latter holds a despotic rule over
doctors, hospitals, teaching estab­lishments, pharmacies, charitable foundations.
It is unnecessary to add that his

guiding star is vivisection, in other words, the
exploitation of the animal world under the guise of "scientific
research."

“Every day one hears of some wonderful discovery in
the field of remedies produced in this way, which achieve enormous sales for a
while, after which their harmfulness and uselessness become apparent. Then the
demand drops...

“It matters not how worthless the alleged
"remedy" may be; despite the harm­fulness which many cases have amply
proved it to represent, the artificially cre­ated reputation which it enjoys
continues for many years, in fact it never ends. So long as it is worthwhile
for the chemical factories to manufacture and sell the medicament, the serum,
the vaccine and so on, the business goes on and on." (Starry Cross, Philadelphia,
Apr. 1927, p. 57)

Major R. F. E. Austin, M.D. Member of the Royal
College of Surgeons, Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians:
"Experiments on animals do not only mean torture and death for the animals,
they also mean the killing of people. Vivisection is a double-edged
sword." (Abolitionist, March 1927)

Dr. John Shaw: "...I hear that Lord Dawson of
Penn (personal physician to the King of England) said a while ago that the
medical profession is losing some of the confidence of the public. My
conviction is that this is attributable to vivisection. I was present at the
first meeting of the anti-vivisection) league in Geneva. I made the
acquaintance there of a Swiss doctor who told me that the medical profession
had formerly been a sacred calling, but was now rather like a trade. Isn't this
so, and isn't vivisection responsible for this?" (From his speech at a
meeting of the "Animal Defence and Anti-vivisection Society", Lon­don,
Dec. 7, 1926; quoted in Anti-Vivisection and Humanitarian Review, Jan -­Feb.
1927)

Dr. E. LapIanche, Nice, a well-known researcher and
writer: "What shall we say about the stubbornness of those who, since the
times of CIaude Bernard, have only discovered complications and increasing
difficulties while following in their Master's footsteps, and who, instead of
finding light, have found the darkness in which they are struggling to be
growing more and more intense...There is no reservation to my condemnation of
vivisection in the name of Science." (Speech at the Anti-Vivisection
Congress in Geneva, Feb. 26, 1927)

Dr. Hastings GiIford, Member of the Royal College of
Surgeons, forme­Iy ‘Hunterian Professor': "...I have had the opportunity
to carry outa general study of the cancer question from all points of
view, and I do not believe that anyone who does so without prejudice can come
to any other conclusion than that it is useless to do research on the cause or
healing of cancer by means of animal experiments." (Reading Standard, Feb.
12, 1927)

"...Is a period of practical training in
physiology (vivisection performed by students) in the form which we experienced
really indispensable for the fu­ture doctor? Formerly I answered this question
in the negative with my feel­ings. Today I do the same with my reason..."
(From Der Arzt und seine Sen­dung, Gedanken eines Arztes, Munich, 1927).

Dr. Erwin Liek, (mentioned in Slaughter) distinguished
physician, whose books awakened great interest in the reform of the art of
healing and convinced many doctors of the need for reforms: "Medicine is a
history of errors...The purely institutional researcher is not a physician. The
only one who can judge medicine is he who is beside the sick...What we learn
about therapy is very little, what we learn about the basics of therapy is
still less, and all the more inaccessible the more it is based on ani­mal
experiments...The attempts to establish the effectiveness of antitoxins on
humans by means of animals are frankly ludicrous...The bactericidal sera amount
in fact to a total bankruptcy...The layman, as well as the physician, should
realise that not one single human illness can be transferred to the guinea-pig.
That sounds incredible, but it is true..." (From Moderne Biologie, Vol.
10, Leipzig, 1926)

"It is the doctor at the sick-bed who has
to have the last word about the value of a medical discovery..." (From Die
zukunftige EntWicklung der Heilkunde, Zeichen der Zeit, Vol. 3)

Lt. Colonel J.F. Donegan, 33 years a military
doctor in the British army:

"During my medical studies I learned what a
doctor should and should not do, and I believed honestly and sincerely in these
dogmas. For years I was one of those who accepted everything without criticism.
I vaccinated thousands of people without understanding anything about it; it
was simply the right thing to do. In my earlier years it seemed just as
self-evident to me as the fact that a doctor wore a frock coat and a top hat,
because that was the fashion.

“In this way I was myself vaccinated against
nearly every disease, because that was the practice, and I was only too ready
to excuse the failures of the anti­-toxins; I was likewise a convinced champion
of their supposed benefits. Then I began to think one day, and to study both
sides of the question. My ideas were totally changed by what I learned.

“The manner in which the medical profession,
misled by false teaching by the vivisectors and antitoxin (serum)
manufacturers, has made animals respon­sible for human ills, can be described
as extremely vindictive...

“It can be described as energy-wasting and a
gross injustice when a vivisec­tor experiments on a dog in order to study human
illnesses, for he will by this means only reach false conclusions which are
inevitably dangerous for human beings.

“Vivisection and antitoxins (serums) are to be
seen as one and the same thing. For the collapse of one of these industries
would also lead to the collapse of the other; the sooner the better. Many may
not believe me when I say that antitox­ins are totally useless." (From a
speech during the Animal Welfare Congress in Philadelphia in Oct. 1926).

"... A much wider field of animal cruelty
is found in the chemical factories in the production of serum from various
animal species, allegedly for the purpose of healing human suffer­ing which
would not otherwise be curable. And the same rule applies here. The doctors
answer: Are we to let mankind perish, to let the child suffocate with
diphtheria, or are we to spare the horses?

“The fact that there is another system of healing,
with hundreds of doctors in Germany, which does not use serums and yet cures
those diseases without the medicaments which the majority of doctors obtain
from the sacrificing of the animal world, that also goes against the time and
its way of viewing things...

“On top of this comes the fact that capital is at work
in the entire pharma­ceutical manufacturing industry, capital that is
interested in achieving profit and, therefore, also interested in combating
everything that can reduce this profit.

“The public must therefore not learn 100 much about
the fact that one can heal without medicine obtained from animal torture, and
the Press is com­manded to ridicule the animal welfarists. Who is aware that
this Press is not allowed to publish anything favorable to the animal
welfarists?" (Tierrecht und Tierschutz)

Report on the lecture on "Doctor, Brutality and
Animal Experiments" held by Dr. Rudolf Bussman (doctor of medicine and of
law) at the Hohenzollem High School, May 3, 1926:

"Dr. Bussmann, himself a practising physician,
who runs his practice on a basis of reformed medicine, and who studied law only
in order to be able to defend himself against the medical hierarchy, gave
shatter­ing insights into the present-day practices of the medical training
estab­lishments; almost every clinic and almost every hospital had their own
labora­tories for practising vivisection: By means of observing and practising
vivisec­tion, every feeling the young students had for living creatures was
systemati­cally destroyed: It was no wonder that any sensitivity towards
suffering human beings, and the human contact between doctor and patients, also
disappeared. The custom of carving up animals like a lump of inanimate matter
was by na­ture necessarily transmitted to the treatment of human beings, who
were in many cases no longer seen as persons to be healed, but only as objects
to study, or, when they were well-to-do, as sources of income.

“The professional tribune, which was trying to muzzle
Bussmann himself, saw to it, with its draconian fines and its ostracism of
those who did not think likewise, that no member of the profession dared to
speak out against these grue­some practices...

“After a few striking words against the daily press,
which suppresses any criticism of the medical hierarchy and their vivisection
methods, but on the other hand broadcasts every supposed success - which
afterwards has often turned out to be a failure (diphtheria serum, tuberculin,
etc.) - as the greatest scien­tific achievement, the speaker came to the
conclusion that the opponents of vi­visection could only achieve their aims by
joining forces with the repre­sentatives of the alternative methods of healing,
which served the well-being of mankind without animal experiments." (Der
Tier- und Menschenfreund, Issue No.2, 1926)

"... and one must be aware of a third factor, if
one wants to understand the attitude of modem science to vivisection. Medicine
has become dependent on the giant chemical industry. The doctors are perhaps no
more than unknowing agents, serving the interests of the capital which is in­vested
in the huge chemical factories. A well-known chemist, Dr. G., told me how
things operate nowadays in such large chemical plants. First of all new
chemical materials are discovered, then the new chemicals are tested on the ani­mals
in the laboratory...A professor or doctor can always be found who will make
experiments with this newly-developed material in the hospital or in his normal
practice. And one day the stuff is thrown onto the market. extolled in every
way, the sick are doctored with it, a lot of money is made, but after 5 to 10
years the stuff is replaced by a new preparation. So the big chemical indus­try
calls the tune and the medical system is dependent on the big chemical works,
i.e. so long as official medicine is dominated by private capitalistic
interests, vi­visection will not disappear from the world. Modem industrialism
pays no consideration to human life. What value can it attach to the animal
world? ... " (Der Tier- und Menschenfreund, Issue No.2, 1926)

In 1926, one of the best known and most respected MDs
in the United King­dom, Waiter R. Hadwen, M.D. universally known as
"Hadwen of Gloucester", (see biography) wrote the following thoughts
in the Journal of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection of which
he was President:

" A call for pioneers. To oppose vivisection,
when every year seems to establish it more as a State­ supported,
Press-advertised "boon to humanity", requires COURAGE. So does every
advance that humanity has made. Those who uphold this practice thought­lessly,
because it is the "proper thing" to do so, would equally, had they
been born earlier, have supported the tortures of the Inquisition or negro
slavery, and would, of course, have agreed with every dogma of medicine,
however absurd or revolting, that belonged to the age in which they lived. We
call for pioneers. Our appeal is to those who have a more alert intelligence,
greater courage and daring, and a higher ideal than the rank and the
file."

Prof. Quenu, the outstanding French surgeon: "No,
in no circumstances should vivisection be used to serve the purpose of
instruction. Even Vulpian, the great physiologist, was opposed to this form of
demonstration. I heard this from the master's own lips... I also reject
vivisection on animals from the sur­gical standpoint. The future surgeon does
not need to perform operations on ani­mals in order to learn his skills.
Operating on animals has nothing in common with operating on humans." (L'
Antivivisection, Paris, edited by Dr. G. R. Laur­ent, M.D. 1926)

Dr. Gennaro Ciaburri, physician and surgeon, Bologna:
"A few cou­rageous persons have had the strength and bravery to tear away
the mask from those bunglers of science by clearly and competently stating that
vivisection is a pointless torment for the animals, who live and feel as we do,
and that science has progressed far more through observation than through the
results of the cruel manipulations by vivisectors." (L'idea zoofila e
zootecnica, 1926, No. 1)

William Howard Hay, M.D.: "You have guessed
right. I am and remain an opponent of vivisection on animals or humans in any
form, not only because every decent person recoils from causing unnecessary
suffering to others, but also because I, after many years of practice as a
doctor and after many years of painstaking research and testing, am not able to
recall one single important gain for mankind that has been achieved through
this inhuman slaughter of animals." (Letter from Buffalo, Richmond Avenue
338, dated November 11, 1925)

Dr. Abel Desjardins, President of the Society of
Surgeons of Paris:

"Vivisection must be examined from three
different viewpoints: from the human, surgical and physiological. Is
vivisection justified from the human view­point? I consider it to be a
monstrosity...Is vivisection useful when viewed from the surgical viewpoint? In
contrast to the view taken by Dr. Tuffler, I will answer you that I do not know
a single good surgeon who has learned anything useful from vivisection. One
learns the profession of a surgeon by acting as assistant over many years to a
skilled surgeon, observing how he overcomes the difficul­ties which arise, one
follows his methods until one is sufficiently familiar with them and able to
perform them oneself and to achieve advances in the opera­ting technique. It
seems to me that the surgeon, who must above all be compas­sionate, can gain
nothing from the teaching of cruelty..." (L'Intransigeant, August
25, 1925)

The self-regulating body: "An acute illness, such
as influenza, smallpox, diphtheria, (whooping cough), etc. is a vigorous effort
of the body to restore health; ...Acute diseases are really, then, body
purifiers. They cleanse it and lengthen life. Indeed, the re-established health
is often at a level considerably above that obtained before illness." (R.
Austin, M.D., in the Abolitionist, August 1, 1 (25)

Dr. Hans Much, Professor at the University of Hamhu -
one of the most famous researchers on tubercolosis of our century: "The
principal question concerning tuberculosis goes: Is there immunity against
tuberculosis? To base research for humans on guinea-pigs means turn­ing
medicine on its head...The question can only be seen in relation to man...If we
also make the little guinea-pig the measure of all things in this case, we must
shrug our shoulders and say 'there is no remedy for tuberculosis' (in the
guinea-pig)! All the more problematical is the curing of tuberculosis in the
human being...In man, the immunity is a natural one following natural
infection. But in the case of the guinea-pig the infection is artificial. For
that reason alone, these little animals are totally irrelevant for researching
these conditions. The guinea-pig behaves exactly the opposite to the human
being." (From Einige Tuberkulosefragen, Zeitschrift fur alle Fragen
der speziellen Tuberkuloseforschung, special supplement to Medizinische
Klinik, Berlin, 1925)

Dr. John Haddon: "...Consequently, vivisection
can be renounced. Its advocates say that it has enabled the physiologists to
further their knowledge of physiology and has thus been of use in the treatment
of illnesses. Their opponents dispute this, however, and I tend to agree with
them." (Medical World, November, 1924)

Dr. Germain See, (Paris, 1924): "Because of its
appeal to reason as well as to sentiment, vivisection will stand as a dark spot
in the barbaric past - defended only by those who have a personal interest in
defending it. It should be wholly eliminated from scientific research and the
vivisector condemned by public opinion - held up to public scorn. The fight
against vivisection is a movement born not of sentiment only, and the arousing
of human hearts to pity by a few so called ignorant dreamers, but appeals to
the deepest feelings of humanity, and can claim, not only a solid basis of
scientific truth, but has its foundation in social, philosophic, and moral
principles. "

Dr.Ph. Marechal, physician, and also Mayor of
the 8th District of Paris, stated in 1914 (as reported in the Journal of the
"International League Against Vivisection", Brussels, April/June
1924, p. 13): "Most of the dangerous medicaments, senseless operations and
inapplic­able theories stem from the criminal and crazy brains of the
vivisectors. There have been and still are heroes within the ranks of the
medical profession, but we do not want to tolerate monsters within it"

Dr. Eduard Reicb, a well-known public health
specialist, replied to an in­vitation to attend a congress against vivisection
in Amsterdam: "There can be nothing more pressingly necessary than for the
barbarity of vivisection to be fought precisely from the scientific angle.
Vivisection is not only the most cruel and loathsome, but also the worst way of
conducting re­search, a shameful discredit to science, the surest path to the
brutalisation of doctors and of the whole of society...Every doctor who casts a
stone at vivisection is performing a service to science, civilisation, religion
and mankind." (Der Tier-und Menschenfreund, 1924, issue 2)

Dr. med. Eckbard, Hanover:

“1. Contrary to the opinion deliberately created among
the public, by far the majority of cruel animal experiments are made without
any anaesthetic. In England, for instance, the country with the best animal
welfare legislation, out of 266,478 experiments in 1926, 253,481, that is about
95%, were carried out without any anaesthetic. In Germany there is
unfortunately no official figure about this, but it is hardly likely to be
significantly different, except for the dif­ference that the number of
so-called scientific animal experiments will be much higher here.

“2. The major part of these animal experiments is of
no scientific charac­ter at all; on the contrary, daily and hourly the most
pointless experiments are made. in which even the layman can immediately
recognise that they cannot have any serious scientific purpose whatever.

“3. Apart from a few exceptions, animal experiments
have led to the most dangerous false conclusions, a situation Professor Hans
Much described with these words: "Today's so-called exact science, with
its false conclusions drawn from animal to man and from the dead to the living,
is the most hollow piece of fanaticism and nonsense of all times." (In a
lecture to doctors in Hamburg, 1924).

“4. It is scientifically certain that almost all the
medicines and serums pro­duced in the world with such a great hullabaloo and
discovered through so-­called animal experimentation have in reality turned out
to be a total failure. I would point out the damage caused by Insulin, the
injuries from Vigantol, the failure of Koch's tuberculin injections, of the
measles and scarlet fever serums and many others. Also, the fact that cancer
research and treatment has not made one step forwards despite more than 25
years of experimentation on millions of animals, that the views of the leading
cancer researchers of all countries do, on the contrary, sharply conflict with
each other. Even a procedure anchored in law, such as smallpox vaccination, is
now the subject of such strong doubts that Holland has abolished compulsory
vaccination for an initial period of two years... (CIVIS: By and by, all
other countries followed suit, as it was proved that vaccination was the
principal. and in some countries the only, cause of the infection. Also cancer
cases have continued to rise, diabetes has skyrocketed since the introduction
of Insulin therapies and, once a rare disease it has become the third cause of
death.)

“Reports on the crushing failures which one has in
fact had most recently with diphtheria serum and vaccination have been provided
by, among others, Prof. W. Stoelzner, Director of the University Hospital in
Koenigsberg (DMW, 1929,) and Prof. Dr. Friedberger, Head of the Institute of
Public Health and Im­munity Studies in Dahlem. Friedberger stressed to the
Pediatrics Association the total uncertainty about the scientific justification
for diphtheria inoculation, the unreliability of the figures produced in
support of inoculation, and quoted in evidence of the failure of inoculation
the fact that out of 100 inoculated child­ren who nevertheless contracted the
disease, precisely as many died as did from 100 children who contracted the
disease without being inoculated. An accusa­tion made by Prof. Czerny at the
Association for Internal Medicine and Pediat­rics in Berlin also casts a
revealing light on the question of diphtheria inocula­tion: "All doctors
have been dragged into diphtheria inoculation, because a pressure was applied
which was almost a compulsion. Such a procedure is un­usual, and indeed had
never existed before.

“The tuberculin put into the hands of orthodox
allopathic medicine, ac­claimed at that time as a triumph of vivisection
research, killed thousands of people, so that special cemeteries had to be
created for the victims of this re­nowned medicament With regard to the
inoculation against canine rabies, I would refer to Pasteur's ‘death lists’.
Over two thousand victims succumbed, but not as a result of the dog-bites,
which were subsequently found to be non ­rabid, but due to the rabies injected
into them at the Pasteur Institute. The remedies against cholera and the plague
have proved to be useless.”

"Vivisection does not limit itself to cutting up
living and conscious animals, which is already outrageous in itself. It goes
yet further, it subjects unanaesthe­tised animals quite unnecessarily to the
most hideous tortures imaginable. If we break through the sealed doors of the
physiological laboratories, better called torture chambers, if we penetrate the
secrecy in which the executioners operate, the following spectacle will be
revealed to us. Feeling, devoted and intelligent beings, much more loyal and
devoted than ourselves, dogs which are cruelly and brutally shackled in an
agonising position, tortured for hours on end by the most appalling methods
that one can imagine...These are the experiments that the learned men carry out
under the mantle of Science. Is that science?

“After the experiment the torment continues. What
happens to these unfor­tunate martyrs after the experiment is ended? I have
seen such poor animals, who were left lying there a whole night, sometimes
longer, with their body slit open, a rod between their jaws, all their limbs
bound together and unable to make the slightest movement. If the animal victim
is unlucky enough not to die, it is used for later experiments. If it is not
useful for any further purpose, this living, wincing and bleeding body is
thrown into a corner, on top of another body...

“What defence is offered by the vivisectors in the
face of these facts? They say that the animals are anaesthetised and that all
the rules are followed in order to spare the animals any pain. Here is the
truth, as admitted by Mr. Borel, him­self a vivisector: 'It's impossible to use
anaesthetics in such a way that the ani­mals feel nothing. The pains to which
the animals are subjected are so great that they suffer a veritable torment
from which only death can release them. The use of curare in no way reduces
their sensitivity to pain; on the contrary, it consider­ably increases
it.'"

Mr. H.A.D. Jowett, D. Sc., of the Wellcome Chemical
Works, writing on "The Limitation of Physiological Standardization"
in British Medical Journal, December 8th, 1923, stated: "The chief
objection to physiological standardization in the other cases (ar­senicals,
digitals, and pituitary) is its inherent inaccuracy; there are numerous reasons
for this, one is that if intact animals are used, the worker is at the mercy of
variations among individual animals, for living animals refuse to be stand­ardized."
(p. 1105)

Dr. med. HJ. Oberdoerfer: "In common with all the
areas of culture, our entire Science, above all, is in need of reform and
repair in all its branches. And especially in physiology and medicine we must
re-think everything from the very basics. For these bran­ches of Science have
created a total fiasco. Life and experience have proved to be better teachers
than hair -splitting and remote- from-life laboratory studies and cruel and
unscrupulous vivisections... It would be no mistake, if one did away with the
major part of the university professorships in which eccentric academ­ics
concoct the ephemeral products of their narrow minds." (Der Tier-und
Menschenfreund, Nos. 7, 8, 9, 1920)

Dr. J.G.B. Bulloch, physician, Washington, U.S.A.:
"When animal tissues are affected by certain procedures, can we assume it
to be sufficiently proved that the human body will react in the same
way?"(The Western Medical
Times, July, 1917)

Dr. EH G. Jones, Buffalo: "When we introduce
serum into the body to treat a disease, we thereby cre­ate disease. Serum
treatment has caused heart disease and is one of the reasons why the number of
deaths from heart disease has doubled in the past ten years. Our activity as
doctors consists in healing the sick, and we must never cause disease in the
human body." (Western Medical Times, U.S.A., July, 1917)

Prof. Dr. O. von Herff, Basel: (Extract from an
obituary tribute delivered by Dr. Paul Hussy to the Medi­cal Faculty of Basel
University, May 5,1916) “He always emphasized that one could not transfer the
results of animal ex­periments to human beings..."

Sir William Fergusson, surgeon. The work Grundriss
der Geschichte der Medizin (Outline of the History of Medicine) by Dr. J.H.
Bass, states on page 923: "The most important surgeons are brought
together at the Hospital of King' s College. The famous Sir William Fergusson,
the Queen's Surgeon, is working there."

We read the following on page 480 of J. L.
Pagel' s Geschichte der Medizin (History of Medicine), Berlin 1915:
"Sir William Fergusson, an exceptionally skillful operator, who combined
the eyes of an eagle with the heart of a lion and the hand of a lady..."

And in the Korrespondenzblattfuer Schweizer
Aertze, No. 38, September 28, 1918, it is reported that Prof. Dr. G.
Courvoisier of Basel travelled as Assis­tant Physician to London, where he came
into contact with the then great auth­orities of British surgery, Fergusson,
etc. What was the opinion of this exceptionally talented surgeon concerning vi­visection?
He made the following declaration to the Royal Commission of Enquiry:

"I do not make any more vivisectional
experiments. I did so formerly, but now I regret it. I did so because others
did it...and because I had no mature insight into the matter." Regarding
the way in which experiments are carried out, the same witness stated that
"publication of the various details would probably lead to intervention by
the public and the high reputation of many learned men would not only be
brought down to its proper level, but far below it."

From an article by WaIter R. Hadwen, M.D. in the
Abolition­ist, April 1, 1914:

“The fact is, experimental investigation with
artificially-produced ex­perimental disease is unscientific and fallacious
whether conducted in animals or man. It must not be assumed that an
artificially-induced disease is on all fours with a natural infection, or that
the type in either case would be invariably the same or that the conclusions
arrived at in regard to one particular investigation would be any guide
whatever in the case of another.

“Even physiologically a similar fallacy is
present. For instance, two Ameri­can professors have recently been conducting a
considerable amount of ex­perimental work upon the spinal cords of dogs in
order to discover the function of the anterolateral column. Similar
investigations have been conducted by sev­eral other prominent men, and the
result is that they are all at loggerheads, al­though the same experiments were
conducted on the same parts, in the same way on the same species of animal.

“After the severe operation of cutting through the
bony column and expos­ing the spinal cord, we read: the dog were carefully
watched from day to day; generally the first observation recorded were made a
day or two after operation, so that the effects of operation itself might not
be mistaken."

The writers (Dr. Williams B. Cadwalader and Dr. J.E.
Sweet), whose contribution is published in the Journal of the American
Medical Association, go on to remark:

"Here we wish to point out one possible source of
confusion. Anyone at all familiar with animals, particularly the laboratory
dog, should not lose sight of the fact that their general conduct and
intelligence influence the manner in which they react to stimuli of any kind;
even in health this may dif­fer very greatly. Each dog has his own peculiarity,
and has a distinct individ­uality not unlike man. Many are extremely dull and
apathetic, and others high­ly-strung, intelligent and active, and accustomed to
respond quickly to the vari­ous stimuli originating through the association of
friends and master.

“After recounting the diametrically opposite
conclusions arrived at by dif­ferent investigators pursuing the same experiments,
the writers conclude: Why such contradictory views should be expressed we have
no explanation to offer unless it is that the character of the dogs has not
always been considered.

“If, then, the nervous constitution of dogs so differs
as to vitiate all attempted physiological conclusions, can we wonder if such
contradictory views are held by vivisectors respecting disease itself where in
most cases the nervous system plays so important a part? And if these
differences exist among dogs themselves to such an extent as to prove a bar to
truly scientific data, how much more are we likely to be misled in arguing from
one human being to another, and still more from animals to man.

“The fact is, the deliberate diseasing of healthy
subjects by inoculatory meth­ods bears no proper relation to the contraction of
disease by natural methods. The disorganisation of the system by the gradual
inroad of disease through some fault of constitution or environment must
perforce be an altogether different pro­cess from that of the direct injection
of diseased matter into a healthy subject whose constitution has undergone no
natural preparation for its reception.

“If, for instance, the products of pneumonic disease be
injected into a healthy animal, even into the lung, instead of pneumonia, blood
poisoning is produced; and we have every, right to assume that the same thing
would result if injected into a human being.

“The whole system of artificial inoculation is beset
with fallacies. That ‘the proper study of mankind is man’ must be admitted, but
let man be studied in a proper and scientific manner. Nature is ever performing
her own experiments in accident and disease, and it is, in the study of these
experiments and the justifiable attempts to remedy them or prevent them in
accordance with natural and truly scientific laws that all our brilliant
triumphs in the knowledge of preventive and curative methods have been
achieved.”

---------

Excerpt from Dr. Walter Hadwen's address
delivered at New­castle-on-Tyne, March 5, 1914, with the title "A Medical
View of the Vivisec­tion Question":

“I maintain that the ordinary man in the street knows
quite as much of this subject as the ordinary medical man, simply because the great
bulk of both classes know nothing whatever about it If you take the medical man
and cross ­examine him upon it, I think he will confess, in the majority of
cases, that he does not know anything about the subject. You cannot understand
it unless you make the subject one of independent study. Unless you investigate
from an en­tirely independent standpoint, unless you are educated upon it, you
cannot un­derstand it. The investigation of this matter forms no part of a
medical curriculum. It is a great mistake to suppose that medical men generally
are authorities upon the subject of experimentation upon living animals. We are
not out to fight the medical men of this land - the 30,000 medical men upon the
Medical Reg­ister, who know nothing about it - we are out to fight 400 or 500
vivisectors who are licensed by the British Government, and who perform their
80,000 to 90,000 experiments annually upon these poor, defenceless creatures.
These are the men we are out to fight. The medical profession knows nothing
about it, and practically, in this respect, the medical man is no better off
than the ordinary man in the street.

“Now, you may ask, "What credentials have you?
What gives you any auth­ority to speak on this subject, more than any other
ordinary medical man?" Sim­ply this: I have studied both sides of the
question, and the majority of my medi­cal colleagues have only accepted one
side. I was brought up to believe in vivi­section; I accepted at my college and
university all the assertions that were made in regard to vivisection, namely,
that great discoveries had been made by this practice, and that it was the only
means by which such discoveries could be achieved in the future, and I took all
this for granted, and I accepted it as a mat­ter of course. For some years
after I was in active practice I still believed in it, still backed up the
assertions which I had so readily accepted, until I was at last led to
investigate the matter for myself from an independent standpoint, and as the
result of that investigation I came to the conclusion that no knowledge what­ever
had been gained by experiments upon animals but what could have been gained,
had been gained by other means of a harmless character; and further, I came to
the conclusion that nothing whatever gained from experimentation upon living
animals had been of the slightest benefit in the amelioration or the cure of
any human ailment or disease.

“Now, that is a very bold assertion to make, you may
say, in the face of the generally accepted opinion of the time. It is not a
matter of whether I am in a minority amongst medical men or in the majority;
that is not the point We have not to deal with majorities or minorities, but,
as I said at the outset of my ad­dress, we have to ask ourselves: Is
Vivisection right or wrong? The unanimity, or otherwise, of the medical
profession makes no difference to the right or wrong of a question, because the
medical profession has been unanimously wrong so many times that really one has
almost come to the conclusion that it never has been unanimous except when it
has been unanimously wrong. Through the whole of history minorities have, as a
rule, been in the right. But do not let us argue from that standpoint, but let
me press upon you again and again, that we must ask ourselves: Is Vivisection
right or is Vivisection wrong?

“You may say: "What led you to the conclusion at
which you have arrived?" Well, strange to say, it was the vivisectors
themselves who converted me to anti­-vivisection. I found that the
contradictions among them were so great that no sooner did one vivisector bring
forward one statement when another vivisector was already ready to come forward
and contradict it while performing precise­ly the same experiment as his
predecessor...”

------------

Dr. med. Hans Fischer, Hohenhausen: “…what vivisectors
do to man and animal is high treason. Vivisectors know what they are doing, are
precisely aware of how criminal and how dangerous to the State their actions
are when they carry out crimes in the service of Science on such people as they
consider to belong to the lower classes - like the lord of the manor considered
the coachman..." (Der Tier-und Menschenfreund. 1914, No. 1)

From an article in the Abolitionist of July 1,
1913, by Dr. Herbert Snow, M.D.:

“As a doctor I may be permitted to add my humble
testimony to all that Dr. Hadwen has told you - that no useful advance in human
knowledge has ever, so far as we can ascertain, proceeded from experiments on
animals, and that all boasted triumphs in that direction are utterly false. And
whenever knowledge proceeding from experiments on these animals has been relied
on, it has been grossly misleading. You, my lord, said in your opening address
that this is essentially a moral question. I do not dispute that, but I want to
point out that it is also essentially a question of commonsense; in other
words, it is not a question for the expert. Those who have mastered and
accepted the principles on which we act, including the principle that no
scientific inference is ever possible be­ tween phenomena in the lower animals
and in man -a principle admitted univer­sally by our adversaries - know that
the whole thing must be a fraud, and noth­ing more.

“It is also essentially a question of
ignorance. Doctors, unfortunately, are ter­ribly ignorant of vivisection, of
what is done in vivisection, and of the princi­ples on which we oppose it There
could be no better proof of that than a letter which appeared the other day in
the Press, with about 150 doctors' names on it, praising the vivisectionists in
reference to a recent deplorable trial of which I need not further speak. I
know a great many of those doctors. They are what I hope all doctors are -
well-meaning and inoffensive men. But they have never studied vivisection; they
know nothing whatever about it.

“In
conclusion, I would like to quote, as well as I can remember them, words which
impressed me very much when I first read them. They were uttered a few years
ago by Admiral Togo, the hero of the late Russo-Japanese war. He re­marked that
what counted most in a man throughout his life was the element of the soldier,
the fighting spirit in him. That is just what we are called upon to show in
reference to this question of vivisection - the fighting spirit to the ut­most.
And I am sure, from what we have seen and heard tonight, that there will be no
thought of looking back. We shall all do our very best until this iniqui­tous,
and unscientific, and utterly useless vivisection system has been rooted out
from our midst.” (Applause.)

------------

The same issue carried an "Obituary" of
another prominent antivivisection­ist doctor, Dr. Forbes Winslow:

“Most of the leading London papers published lengthy
obituary notices of Dr. Forbes Winslow, the eminent brain specialist, who died
suddenly, on the morning of June 8, from a heart attack. He was in his
seventieth year. Dr. Winslow was the founder of the British Hospital for Men­tal
Diseases. He was remarkable as the first physician to urge the plea of in­sanity
in criminal cases. This is now such a commonplace idea that it is diffi­cult to
realise that it required courage and independence of mind in a physician
convinced of its truth to bring it forward in the first instance. It was
violently opposed on moral and theological grounds, until the amount of
evidence forth­coming in its support compelled attention, and finally
acceptance.

“Dr. Winslow first came into prominence in connection
with the Penge mys­tery, in 1877. He was intimately connected as an expert with
many famous crimi­nal cases, such as the Tichborne case, the trial of Mrs.
Dyer, the Maybrick mur­der, and the series of terrible crimes laid to the door
of the unknown ‘Jack the Ripper’, whom Dr. Winslow always regarded as a morbid
religious enthusiast who had become insane. He received many letters signed
"Jack the Ripper", the handwriting of which corresponded with that of
the murderer, and when he pub­lished the result of his investigations the
crimes suddenly ceased. Dr. Forbes Winslow was always emphatic in his
condemnation of vivisec­tion, expressing the view that it was specially
misleading and ridiculous in brain investigations. He was indignant at the
proposal to license Cardiff Mental Hos­pital for Vivisection. and took part in
our protest meeting held there on June 8. 1911. He also wrote a letter to The
South Wales Daily News, in which he re­marked:

“’Vivisecting animals is only a lame excuse for
experiments on human beings. This. I emphatically declare, is done, although
unknown to the Com­missioners in Lunacy.'

“And again:

‘”Forty years' study of the treatment of insanity in
my official connection with three London hospitals has failed to elicit one
single diagnosis or cure which I have to thank the vivisectors for. In the last
annual report of the Com­missioners in Lunacy. who visited all asylums during
the year and inspected 130,593 inmates, not one single line chronicles the cure
of any patient through the medium of serum.’”

-----------

From a long article in the Animals' Guardian of
January 1913, by Dr. William R.D. Blackwood, a Philadelphia physician:

“I have been opposed to vivisection all my life, and I
have been opposed to it for several reasons. First of all, because of the
frightful cruelty which is in­flicted upon the victims who are vivisected, both
animals and human beings, and because of the absolute senselessness and
inutility of the whole business. If a single fact has been established that is
for the good of human beings by vivi­section. I do not know it. I read
everything I get hold of. I listen to all they have to say. I have been present
at a good many vivisections in my time, and I have never yet seen anything demonstrated
that was for the good of suffering hu­manity...

“Vivisection has never produced a solitary result for
the good of humanity, although it has been in operation for several hundred
years. and it never will produce any, because it is impossible to treat human
bodies in the same way and obtain the same results as you would in animals. It
is absolute nonsense. and I hope the day will come, and I think it is coming,
when vivisection will be looked down upon and vivisectionists will not be
considered gentlemen, but will be looked upon as cowardly, miserable rascals,
and that is what they are!!!

“I am satisfied that the light thrown upon medical
knowledge from a hun­dred carefully conducted post-mortem investigations has
been of more value to the profession and to mankind than all experiments of all
the vivisectors that have ever lived.”

Dr. W. Dodge. physician: "The vivisector's
laboratory is a veritable cham­ber of horrors, a real brothel of
pseudo-science. Vivisectional experiments are not one jot less cruel, godless
and shameful than the horror of the auto-da-fe in the Dark Ages. Moreover,
vivisection is totally useless, because experiments on living animals have
never taught us anything useful for human surgery and me­dicine, and for
obvious reasons can never teach us anything."

(The Open Door, Jan. 1913, No. 6)

Dr. George Wilson, LL. D., a Medical
Officer of Health, who was ap­pointed a member of the Royal Commission on
Vivisection (1906-12) declared in a Reservation Memorandum appended to the
findings of that Commission: "The real advance in modern medicine has
depended almost entirely on clini­cal diagnosis, therapeutics, and pathology,
guided by a careful study of natural causes, but not upon experiments on animals,
which are inherently misleading in their application to man, and therefore,
always more or less unreliable."

Dr. Stephen Townsend, M.R.C.S.: "I
studied physiology for three years at the London Hospital, and I passed the
examination in physiology for admission to the Royal College of Surgeons
without ever having been present at an experi­ment on a living animal or having
any need for this. After that I lectured for two years at the physiology
classes at a Scottish university where these experiments were performed for
demonstration purposes. I had to come to the conclusion that these experiments
were not only unnecessary, but actually caused a totally unjustified waste of
time." (The Anti-Vivisection Review. Sept.-Oct. 1912)

Dr. med. Marie Heim-Voegtlin, Zurich:
"The fact that all these experi­ments are repeated for the hundredth time
in the lecture- hall is irresponsible, and quite certainly a brutalizing
influence on our young doctors, many of whom quite definitely carry over their
hardened attitude towards the tormented ani­mals into their subsequent medical
practice." (Letter dated Aug. 1912)

Excerpt from an article in the Abolitionist
of May 1, 1912, reporting in full an interview with Dr. Doyen, a French
researcher, which had appeared in the Paris Journal and of which The
Morning Leader of February 22, had already published a brief summary:
"For my research I use neither guinea-pigs nor mice nor rabbits; I
consider it, in fact, a grave error to try to study the whole of human
therapeutics on small animals. The tuberculosis of the guinea-pig is not that
of man, any more than the cancer of mice is identical with that of man. It is
pre­cisely because masses of animals are killed so uselessly in all the
laboratories that therapeutical research has been sterile for so long. I have
made, like other savants, hecatombs of guinea-pigs. I have proved that the
results obtained with these animals do not in the least apply to man. For
example, one can inject twenty doses of atrophine under the skin of a guinea-pig
which would be fatal for an adult man. I have tried my vaccines on myself in
order to prove their in­nocuity to the human system."

Dr. Fratscher, general practitioner,
Kreuzlingen: "... is in agreement with the aims of the International
Alliance against Vivisection." (Letter dated Apr. 1, 1912)

The wife of Dr. Emmenengger, Lucerne:
"In reply to your praiseworthy literature about vivisection, I am writing
to inform you that my husband would certainly have joined this movement, but he
died in February. " (Lucerne, Mar.28, 1912)

Dr. H. Boucher, physician,
Issy-les-Moulineaux, France: "In all ages Man has sought to justify the
cruelty of his actions by decking them under the mantle of a lofty ideal...In
our present age, in which cruelty has in fact only changed its form, but in
which we profess to be more enlightened than in former times, living crea­tures
are tortured in the name of higher interests of humanity, in the name of
Science...It goes without saying that today's torturers, like their predecessors,
boast of the gratifying results of their cruel methods. Thus in all the
journals at their disposal, in all their classical works, they turn the heads
of the young by asserting that it is thanks to vivisection that Harvey
discovered the circulation of blood, Galvani electricity, Claude Bernard the
causes for the formation of sugar in the human organism, and so forth. Finally,
in order to prove the triumph of their method, they remind us that it resulted
in the invention of the "healing" sera for diseases. Well, we are not
afraid to say all these statements are in fact false, that tortures, whether
religious, legal or scientific, have always produced only hideous results, and
that they have led only to error, disaster and degener­ation..." (From his
lecture at the Fifth International Anti-Vivisection Congress in Zurich, 1912)

Dr. Duekow, general practitioner in
Poltawa, Russia: "... Brought up in this unhealthy atmosphere of both
clinical and experimental violence, the doctor gradually loses all compassion for
living creatures and gets a quite perverted conception of his extraordinary
superiority, which enables him to consider him­self the sole master of all
creation and to sacrifice everything to his supposed Science. This feeling of
superiority finally becomes habitual to him, so that he also looks down upon
his fellow men, the sick, as mere objects for scientific in­vestigation and
experiments, and considers them as clinical material which he can handle just
as he chooses for the purpose of settling his "scientific" doubts. So
it is not at all strange or unusual if the doctors, in this atmosphere so
destruc­tive to all human feeling, seize on the new vaccination method with
pleasure, in order to use it both on healthy as well as on ailing "human
material", as they think fit, partly for experimental purposes... " (Ueber
die Notwendigkeit einer Reform der gegenwartigen medizinischen
Universitaetsbildung - On the need for reform of current medical
training at universities - Leipzig, 1912, p. 42)

Dr. med. Segesser, Degersheim:
"Vivisection has no right to exist. Only through a natural way of living
and healing, and in certain cases a surgical oper­ation, can one prevent and
heal diseases, but not by applying to human beings the results obtained through
experiments on animals." (Letter dated Feb. 1912)

"An experiment on an animal gives
no certain indication of the result of the same experiment on a human
being."(Dr. Robert Koch, Report
of the Second Royal Commission on Vivisection.

1906-1912, p.31, par.48)

"The discovery of anaesthetics owes nothing to
experiments on animals. " (Report of Royal Commission on Vivisection, 1912,
p. 26)

The well-known German physician, Dr. Wolfgaog
Boho, in the medical journal Aerztliche Mitteilungen (No. 7/8, 1912):
"The proclaimed purpose of vivisection has not been achieved in any field,
and it can be predicted that it won't be achieved in the future either. On the
con­trary, vivisection has caused enormous damage, has killed thousands of
people... We have a great number of medicines and therapeutical techniques
which have been perfected without torturing animals, but they have not been
used and pro­pagated as they deserve because our generation of researchers
don't know any other method than the vivisectionist one... The constant spread
of the vivisectionist method has achieved but one thing: to increase the
scientific torture and murder of human beings. We can expect this increase to
continue, for it would just be the logical consequence of animal
vivisection."